Ancient Philosophy 5 161

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Platonic Eros and What Men Call Love

David M. Halperin

I can still recall the feeling of bewilderment I experienced at the age of seventeen
when, during my first term in college, I encountered the following exchange between
Socrates and Agathon in W.H.D. Rouse’s translation of Plato’s Symposium:
‘Now then,’ said Socrates, ‘ ... say whether Love desires the
object of his love?’
‘Certainly,’ said Agathon.
‘Is it when he has what he desires and loves that he desires and
loves it, or when he has not?’
‘Most likely, when he has not,’ said he.

‘Come now,’ said Socrates, ‘let us run over again what has been
agreed. Love is, first of all, of something; next, of those things which
one lacks?’
‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well now, it has been agreed that he [Love] loves what he lacks
and has not?’
‘Yes,’ he said.1
What seemed self-evident to me at the time I read those words was exactly the reverse.
To be able to love only what one lacks and does not have was a characteristic foible, ,
I thought, of neurotics, or masochists, or extreme romantics, and indicated some psy-
chological dysfunction impeding the formation of stable and intimate relationships.
Successful, healthy love—as exemplified in the paradigm of emotional and erotic ful-
fillment held out to me by society: namely, marriage—consisted precisely in the love
of what one had. Nor was my way of thinking so very different from that of the ancient
Greeks. As Achilles says in the Iliad, δς τις άνήρ άγαθός καί έχέφρων/τήν αύτοΰ φιλέει
καί κήδεται (ix 341-342: ‘any man who is good and sensible loves and cares for her
who is his own’).
My bewilderment disappeared, of course, as soon as I could read the Symposium
in the original and, thus, understand the point of the questions which Rouse had so
puzzlingly rendered: Πότερον εχων αυτό οΰ έπιθυμεΐ τε καί έρά, είτα έπιθυμεΐ τε καί
έρα, ή ούκ εχων; Ούκοΰν ώμολόγηται, ού ένδεής έστι καί μή έχει, τούτου έράν; (200a,
201b). Plato, I discovered, was not discussing love at all but rather eros (ίρως), or
lU-ί.

passionate sexual desire—a single aspect of what we normally consider love. Erotic
passion for husband or wife is indeed an important component of any good marriage,
for the Greeks as for us,2 but neither culture is disposed to treat eros as the affective
basis of or the single most highly prized element in a life’s partnership.3 As Achilles’
remark implies, what predominates in a successful marriage, or even in a sexual rela-
tionship of any duration, is not desire but love, not eros but philia (φιλία).4 The rela-
tion of eros to philia in marriage and the priorities governing the operation of each
are set forth with unusual explicitness by Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium (179b-c);
the import of Phaedrus’ mythological allusion has been aptly summarized as follows:
‘Alcestis had philia for her husband, Admetus, and so did his parents; but “because
of her eros for him she so surpassed them in philia” that she was willing to die in
his place, while they were not.’5 In other words, her love for Admetus—the fundamental
motive force behind her act of self-sacrifice—was a strong and militant love because
it happened to be accompanied by the additional ingredient of erotic passion. Simi-
larly, the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws claims that one of the beneficial results
of restricting men’s possible sexual partners to the women from whom they can hope
for legitimate offspring will be to make them oikeioi and philoi, affectionately attached,
to their own wives (839b),6 and that, after all, is the mark of a successful marriage.7
In the Symposium, however, Socrates was questioning Agathon about eros and
epithymia—about sexual desire, then, not love or philia—and, as Rouse’s version
properly emphasizes, it is obvious that one cannot desire and long for the enjoyment
of an object which one already possesses and enjoys (except in the sense of wishing
to continue to enjoy it, as Socrates explains [200d]).®
Modem efforts to gain an accurate historical understanding of Platonic love have
been as frequently betrayed by the application of the term ‘love’ to Plato’s theory as
they have been by the changing significance of the term ‘Platonic.’ To be sure, the
vulgar meaning of ‘Platonic love’ has long been in disgrace among students of classi-
cal Greek literature, accustomed as they are to cautioning their less wary colleagues
in other branches of learning that there is hardly anything ‘Platonic’ about either the
erotic doctrine articulated by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium or the ideal relationship
between lover and beloved envisaged by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus.’ The French,
Thomas Gould informs us, have even gone so far as to devise a terminology that dis-
tinguishes between the popular and authentic conceptions of Plato’s theory by differen-
tiating amour platonique from amour platonicien.10 Similarly, every teacher of Greek
knows that it is not legitimate to regard the word eros in Attic usage generally or in
Plato’s writings specifically as an exact equivalent of ‘love’ in modem English, but
specialists have been slow to confront the full implications and consequences of that
fact. Indeed, even scholars familiar with the philosophical texts in the original are
still in the habit of thinking and writing about the Symposium and Phaedrus as if the
central topic of those dialogues were love as we currently understand the word. Thomas
Gould—to choose only the example nearest to hand—remarks that Plato ‘will try to
extend love to include all desire’," whereas in feet the reverse is more likely to be
true: Plato enlarges the scope of desire (for that is what eros primarily signifies) until
it has become—if not the foundation for a theory of all love, as Gould claims 12—at
least a substitute and replacement for other, more conventional ways of formulating
the affective basis of human choice and motivation. More recently, Irving Singer and
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Gregory Vlastos have each adjudged the Platonic theory deficient as a philosophy of
love and have elicited, in turn, a spirited defense of its adequacy from Plato’s parti-
sans. 131 propose to argue that if we do not require Plato to bear the unnecessary bur-
den of satisfying our criteria for a coherent philosophy of love (in the full sense of
the word), we shall not only be more just in our criticisms of him but may also elimi-
nate a number of obstacles to appreciating the subtlety, relevance, and originality of
his thought.
I
In attempting to distinguish between the meanings of erds in Greek and iove’ in
English we can no longer appeal to the facile historicism of those who consider love
an invention of the twelfth century or who deny the existence of a word for ‘love’
in ancient Greek.14 As Vlastos and K.J. Dover have each demonstrated in different
connections, the verb philein and its derivatives come close to signifying in classical
Greek much of what we today signify by ‘love’;15 if philia does not mean quite the
same thing as ‘love’, it at least refers to much the same thing as the English word.
Plato concerns himself with philia in the Republic, whose interlocutors envisage an
ideal society consolidated by the fraternal love of its citizens,16 and he devotes the
Lysis to exploring the weaknesses of the traditional ways of conceiving philia in Greek
culture;17 he also appears to share the conventional tendency of his age to ascribe bond-
ing in nature and in society to the operation of philia (e.g., Gorg. 507e-508a; Soph.
242e-243a; Tim. 32c; Ale. Maj. 126c-127d).18 It is all the more noteworthy, then, that
in his most detailed investigations of the phenomenon of attraction or bonding between
individual human beings Plato should choose to emphasize the role not of philia but
of erds.
According to Vlastos, erds differs from philia in at least three important respects:
‘(i) it is more intense, more passionate . . . ; (ii) it is more heavily weighted on the
side of desire than of affection (desire, longing, are the primary connotations of erds,
fondness that of philia)·, (iii) it is more closely tied to the sexual drive (though philein
may also refer to sexual love . . . ): for non-incestuous familial love one would have
to turn to philia in lieu of erds . . . ’,9 Dover defines erds succinctly as the ‘intense
desire for a particular individual as a sexual partner’ and goes on to observe, ‘The
word is not used, except rhetorically or humorously, of the relations between parents
and children, brothers and sisters, masters and servants or rulers and subjects.’20
Because, as Dover remarks, erds is thought of chiefly as ‘a response to the stimulus
of visual beauty’, it is not necessarily evoked by the entire complex of admirable or
lovable qualities possessed by the person who serves as its target.21 In short, erds con-
ventionally refers in Greek to the passionate longing awakened in us by the appeal
of physical beauty. Plato's inquiry into the nature of ‘erotics’ (toe eptoxtxd)—whatever
its ultimate goal—is concerned in the first instance not with the emotion or sensation
of love, however defined, but with the phenomenon of attraction between people, with
what we would now call sexual desire. To say that, of course, is not to imply that
Plato’s theory of erds purports to account for the positive, physiological and behavioral,
facts of human sexuality as we currently understand them; sexual desire represents
a proper subject of study for an erotic philosopher not insofar as it can be described
as something specifically sexual—that is, as a biophysical process—but insofar as it
can be described as an expression of intentionally—that is, as a manifestation of the
capacity of mental events to be directed to objects and states of affairs in the world.22
Although we often choose to employ a certain delicate periphrasis in speaking of sex-
ual desire and call it, accordingly, ‘love’,23 we must realize that by erds Plato refers
not to love in the global sense in which we often intend that word but to one kind
or aspect of love—or, rather, to the intense desire which often goes by the name of
love. That there does not exist in English a totally satisfactory way of expressing the
exact meaning of eros (we cannot, after all, substitute for ‘lover’ some other word
such as ‘desirer’) only increases our obligation to be conceptually clear in our efforts
to elucidate Plato’s erotic theory.
Proust’s Baron de Charlus may well have been correct in pointing out the essential
affinities between all forms of passionate love, irrespective of object (whether mis-
tress or daughter),24 but the greater precision of Greek terminology makes it nonetheless
absurd to expect the Platonic eros to account for all love, especially for the love between
parents and children or between siblings in any context short of incest. Anyone who
approaches Plato with a contrary assumption is doomed to disappointment, as Singer
discovered: One turns to Plato in the hope of learning about human relations, specif-
ically about the phenomenon known as love. . . . [But] Platonic love [does not] really
explicate the nature of love itself, reducing as it does ‘married love, parental love,
filial love, love of humanity to mere imperfect approaches to the philosopher’s love’.25
The real wonder, of course, is not that Plato treats those other kinds of love as by-
products, in some sense, of eros (that was an option which contemporary conceptions
of erds left open to him)26 but that he manages to work them into his erotic doctrine
at all. Even stranger than Singer’s attack is L.A. Kosman’s defense of the Platonic
eros as a summons of the beloved object to its true nature: Kosman cites, as paradig-
matic examples of the love that calls us to ourselves, relationships ‘not with people
we are necessarily attracted to or choose’ but rather with ‘parents, family, children,
perhaps above all one’s self.27 Those are obviously the very persons whom the Greeks
would be least inclined to consider permissible—or even possible28—objects of eros.
In fact, Plato admits as much quite explicitly: in the supposedly Lysianic oration recited
by Phaedrus in the dialogue which bears his name, the speaker attempts to discount
the noble affection obtaining between passionate lovers by the following appeal to com-
mon sense. ‘If however you are disposed to think that there can be no firm friendship
\philia, or “love”] save with a lover [erdn, or “one who happens to desire you pas-
sionately”], you should reflect that in that case we should not set store by sons, or
fathers, or mothers, nor should we possess any trustworthy friends [philoi] : no, it
is not to erotic passion [epithymia toiaute, or “sexual desire”] that we owe these
. .. ’ (233d).29 And in the Symposium Socrates is even more emphatic: γελοΐον γάρ
&v ειη τό έρώτημα εΐ Έρως έστίν ερως μητρός ή πατρός . . . (199d: ‘for it would be
ridiculous to ask whether Eros were eros for mother or father’). If we did not insist
on pressing the Platonic eros into service as a theory of love in general, we would
be more likely to avoid such elementary misapprehensions.
The Platonic erds, then, refers in the first instance not to love but to sexual attrac-
tion. There are, however, many ways of interpreting the intentionality of sexual desire,
and here the evidence indicates that Plato’s outlook was radically different from that
of most of his contemporaries.30 In Greek erds originally meant any longing capable
 iOD

of satisfaction, and for Athenians of Plato’s day eros still retained the sense which
it, or its ancestor, possesses in the conventional Homeric phrase, αύτάρ έπεί πόσιος
καί έδητύος έξ ερον !ντο (‘when they had expelled their eros of food and drink’).31
In other words, even when the Greeks had largely transferred the operation of erds
to the more specialized arena of personal relations,32 they continued to understand
it by analogy with hunger and thirst:33 throughout the classical period eros—and sex-
ual desire in general—is treated by our sources as one of the necessities, or innate
compulsions, of human nature34 (and against necessity, as Simonides said, even the
gods do not fight).35 Like hunger or thirst, the desire aroused in us by the sight of
a beautiful human form is a longing capable of satisfaction, according to the ordinary
Greek conception, inasmuch as it aims at the physical possession of a real and attainable
object in the world; once that object has been attained, possessed, and consumed in
the sexual act, the longing for it disappears. Just as the object sought by hunger must,
in order to qualify as a possible source of gratification, be pleasing to the stomach,
so the object sought by eros is conventionally required to be pleasing to the eye: ‘from
beholding derives man’s desiring’, the tragic poet Agathon wrote, employing a spe-
cious and untranslatable etymological pun that continued to be echoed throughout the
succeeding centuries.36 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle furnishes, as he so often
does, a rather more systematic formulation of the popular conception; he traces the
source or origin (αρχή) of eros to the pleasure afforded by sight (ή διά τής δψεως ήδονή),
adding that no one experiences eros who has not first been attracted by a person’s
visual form (προησθείς τή ιδέα)—though such attraction, Aristotle is careful to point
out, while necessary, is not of course in and of itself a sufficient condition of erotic
passion (ix 1167a4-7; cf. Plutarch, Mor., fr. 134 [Sandbach]). An approximation to
the Greek outlook on eros can be found closer to our own day in the Songs and Sonets
of John Donne, who at one point describes his previous amorous activity as the pur-
suit of ‘any beauty I did see, Which I desir’d, and got’. In our more ramified and
categorical vocabulary hunger, thirst, and eros so conceived would properly be termed
appetites, and in what follows I shall use ‘appetite’—at least, provisionally—to sig-
nify a longing for the physical gratification of a need, a longing whose immediate
aim is the possession and consumption of an object in the world.
The object-directed, acquisitive, and consummatory character of eros as it is tradi-
tionally understood in Greek culture is expressed metaphorically in the lyric poetry
of the archaic period by the recurring image of amorous pursuit and flight, hunting
and capture (or escape), διώκειν and φευγειν.37 The conceit is elaborated in the almost
formulaic comparison of the lover to a wild beast, usually a lion, and the beloved
to its prey, usually a fawn;38 the implication seems to be that in the sexual act one
person becomes the object and possession of another.39 To be sure, whenever the lover’s
attempt to possess his beloved is frustrated, postponed, or prohibited, eros is liable
to turn into that acquisitive obsession and characteristic overvaluation of the individual
object which constitute sexual passion.40 But the passion of eros still falls within the
class of desires capable of definitive satisfaction, in the customary Greek way of think-
ing, because It can be assuaged and eventually eliminated by repeated sexual inter-
course. Hence, the importance for a lover’s emotional hygiene of a speedy
consummation of his desire.41 In Menander’s Dyskolos, for example, the highly prac-
tical (if ignoble) Chaireas—sounding a bit like the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Uai-
sons Dangereuses42—maintains that τό μέν βραδύνειν γάρ τον έρωτ’ αΰξει πολύ,/έν τώ
ταχέως δ’ ένεστι παύσασθαι ταχύ (62-63: ‘for slowness [in achieving gratification] greatly
increases eras, but in swiftness there is swift surcease’). The gods conduct their own
amorous affairs with a similar despatch: when Apollo, in Pindar’s Ninth Pythian,
is about to ‘accomplish the delicious conclusion of mating’, the poet admiringly
remarks, ώκεία δ’ έπειγομένων ήδη θεών/πράξις οδοί τε βραχείαι (68-69: ‘the action
of gods in their urgency is quick and their ways are short’).
It was, therefore, not uncharacteristic for a Greek lover to plead, ‘Let me have what
I ask of you so that I can get rid of my eros: put me out of my misery.’43 Such a
plea testifies to the temporary, albeit intense, fluctuations of eros and identifies it as
an appetite. (Demosthenes speaks quite seriously about the extravagance of a traitor
who wastes his ill-gotten wealth on ‘whores and fish’ [xix 229]: see, also, Plutarch,
Mor. 750d-e; cf. Aristophanes, Nub. 1073; Athenaeus, xiii 592f.) It was doubtless in
order to protect potential victims from the tyranny of eros that Xenophon’s Socrates
(Mem. i 3.14), much like his Antisthenes (Symp. 4.38), advised the ordinary man to
procure the easiest and cheapest release of sexual tension on those occasions when
he is troubled by it.44 That attitude was taken to its logical conclusion by Diogenes
the Cynic,45 whose famous masturbatory gesture later earned Galen’s approval on
hygienic grounds (De loc. aff. vi 5 [8.419 K]),46 and by Lucretius in book 4 of his
De rerum natura. Adapting the Epicurean doctrine about the propriety of gratifying
natural and necessary pleasures (among which Epicurus himself probably did not
include sex, however),47 Lucretius counselled any man likely to be beset by amor
to obtain the minimal requisite satisfaction owed to nature by periodically jettisoning
his accumulated seminal fluid into the nearest convenient human receptacle (in cor-
pora quaeque: 1065)48 in order to preserve the tranquillity of his soul (cf. Galen, De
loc. aff. vi 6 [8.450-51 K]). Lucretius based that precept on a bizarre physiological
theory, but his general outlook is informed by a perfectly orthodox classical assump-
tion, namely, that amor is a natural appetite which can be rationally gratified and
only becomes passionate (that is, pathological—a νόσος or ‘disease’, literally speak-
ing) when it is afforded no release.49 Similarly Horace, in an Epicurean mood, praised
parabilis Venus facilisque (Serm. i 2.119: cf. Martial ix 32). Such an outlook on sexu-
ality is already implicit in the Homeric formula which, as we have seen, assimilates
eros to the status of an appetite.
Π
f
Plato, of course, was fully acquainted with the contemporary Greek attitude to sex-
uality. He subjects it to merciless ridicule in the Phaedrus, where it provides the ideo-
logical basis for a highly disreputable and paradoxical speech alleged to be the work
of Lysias.50 What, after all, could be a better illustration of the folly of the conven-
tional outlook than the Lysianic speaker’s claim that, since the sexual urge is safer
and more economical to indulge than erotic passion, a handsome youth should sub-
mit only to the advances of one who does not passionately desire him? As Socrates
remarks, one might as well argue that boys should favor the poor instead of the rich,
the old instead of the young (227c). Assuming the persona of an older man who is
in the process of negotiating the surrender of the youth in question, Lysias had aigued
that the μή έρών (me eron, ‘non-lover’) acts willingly, not out of ανάγκη or compul-
 1U /

sion, and so retains complete control of his affairs and of himself (231a); he therefore
behaves more discreetly and more rationally than the lover, and is better able to pro-
mote both his own interests and those of his partner (231e-234c).51 As Josef Pieper
comments, the Lysianic speaker displays a supreme concern for psychological hygiene
and for efficiency in matters of human intercourse: ‘The scarcely dissimulated sen-
suality is combined with a scientific interest in techniques for living.’52 But Lysias’
argument also depends on the traditional assumption that sexual desire is a natural
appetite which can and ought to be rationally gratified. Only on that assumption can
the speaker portray himself as a sensible, realistic, and virtuous individual properly
engaged in the pursuit of his own as well as other people’s advantage, while depicting
the lover as a dangerous lunatic caught in the grip of an intense and transient passion.
In Plato’s Greek, however, the irony of the Lysianic position is palpable. For erós
customarily refers not only to sexual passion but also to sexual attraction tout court,53
and the Lysianic speaker encourages us to identify those two meanings of eros by reserv-
ing the word epithymia, the more general Greek term for appetite or desire, not for
his own rally ing-cry, not in order to distinguish his own—putatively wholesome-
motive from that of the lover’s, as one might have expected (cf. 237d4-5), but solely
to specify the content of the lover’s erós (231a3, 232b2, 232e4, 232e6, 233bl, 233d3,
234a7):34 the lover’s true motive, in other words, is not erotic passion but physical
lust. The result of that insinuation is to make the motives of the ‘non-lover’ com-
pletely opaque: What does the me eron want, and why has he mounted such an elaborate
argument if indeed he does not himself feel any eros, any desire, for the boy? Socrates
removes the difficulty in his reformulation of Lysias’ speech by introducing the cru-
cial proviso that the speaker really is attracted to the youth in question but has deter-
mined to conceal and deny his eros for the purpose of rhetorical effectiveness (237b).55
Socrates thereby reveals Lysias’ argument to be a sham, a mischievous attempt to cloak
the true nature of erós beneath a show of sweet reasonableness. The Phaedrus as a
whole is predicated on a very different assumption, namely, that erós is not a natural
appetite56 but an irrational—or, rather, supra-rational—passion, a mania:51 however
temporary or fluctuating in its manifestations, erós by its very nature is ultimately
a transcendental force.
The picture of erotic desire that emerges from Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Sym-
posium and is later confirmed, with some alterations, in its authority by Diotima is
wholly unlike the conventional Greek view of sexuality as a natural, rationally gratifi-
able appetite. Aristophanes’ myth addresses the question which is asked with increasing
urgency throughout the Symposium and which Plato, it seems, continued to ask through-
out his life: What does the lover really want? What is the ultimate aim of erós?5*
Aristophanes’ charming story of the eight-limbed aboriginal creatures cut in half by
Zeus is designed to prepare us to accept the truly radical solution to the puzzle of
erotic intentionality which Hephaestus will propose at the myth’s conclusion. When
the double beings who were our ancestors, according to Aristophanes, were first
bisected and later reunited, the two halves of each former individual were far from
being satisfied in the mutual possession of their complements.59 Rather, they clung
to one another so desperately that they perished for lack of sustenance (Wla-b).60 Zeus
eventually took pity on them and moved their genitals to the side their bodies faced,
so that they might have some requital of their desire and turn it, if homosexual, to
168

productive or, if heterosexual, to reproductive ends (I91b-c).61 But the delightful pos-
sibility of sexual consummation does not answer to the most fundamental aspect of
the desperate longing we experience; the new sexual apparatus has been deliberately
contrived in such a way as to prove laughably inadequate to the task of realizing our
innate desire for wholeness. Sex is a substitute for what we really desire but are no
longer in a position to demand: it is something inauthentic insofar as it was invented
to displace and replace our striving for that true nature from which we had been for-
cibly alienated.62 Classical and modem assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding,
then, sexual intercourse is not the ultimate aim of sexual desire, according to
Aristophanes. What is? Not even an experienced lover is likely to know the answer.
Those who spend their whole lives together ‘could not say what they wish to gain
from one another’, Aristophanes remarks. ‘No one would think it was sexual inter-
course', he adds, ‘or that for the sake of sex each partner so earnestly enjoys his union
with the other. But it is clear that the soul of each lover wants something else, which
it is not able to say, but it divines what it wants and hints at it’ (192c-d; cf. Resp.
505d-e). Aristophanes hypothesizes that if Hephaestus were to approach two lovers
while they were in bed having sex and ask them whether they wished to be fused,
to be joined so intimately to one another as to become a single being, they would
instantly recognize the true goal of their desire. Eros, Aristophanes concludes in a
famous sentence, is nothing else but the name we give to the desire and pursuit of
the whole (192d-193a).
That does not mean, however, that erds in Aristophanes’ myth represents a love
of whole persons, as Martha Nussbaum claims.63 On the contrary: Aristophanes’ frag-
mentary beings desire one another not for the sake of one another but for the sake
of individual self-fulfillment and existential restoration. Hence, individuals belong-
ing to the same gender are fungible for erotic purposes: Aristophanes recounts that
when one half of a former double being died, the remaining half, having lost posses-
sion of its original complement, would seek out another individual of the same gen-
der and repeat with him or her the embrace he had earlier assayed with the half of
himself he had lost (191b). Desire for Aristophanes, and for Plato as well, is trans-
ferential in the Freudian sense: it is shaped by a primary object-choice and displaced
from an originary object onto substitutes for it (‘surrogates’) that resemble it generi-
cally in certain crucial respects and are chosen on the model of the originary object.
The individual features of any particular object, besides those—such as gender—that
qualify it for admission to the more general class of possible vehicles of libidinal invest-
ment, are apparently of no importance for erotic bonding.
The psychological implications of Aristophanes’ celebrated myth are startling.
Aristophanes in effect posits two distinct and discontinuous longings in human beings:
first, a longing for transcendental union with an originary object subsequently lost
in an archaic trauma—a longing that antedates the development of the sexual organs
and is, therefore, not essentially sexual by nature—and, second, a longing for sexual
union with specific human beings which, though in principle satisfiable, has its source
in the antecedent urge to recover an existential wholeness that is forever beyond the
power of physical sex to achieve.64 As Singer remarks, Aristophanes’ myth—despite
its optimistic finale (193c-d)—is Plato’s way of illustrating ‘the futility of sex. For
he knows that it does not enable the lovers to melt into one another.’65 Sexual posses-
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sion of the beloved object, however much we may seek it, is but the immediate, proxi-
mate aim of erotic desire, on this view, not its true goal or terminus, for sex ultimately
cannot fulfill the primaeval longing for transpersonal union which the beloved object
awakens in us. Physical sex is doomed in principle to frustration, then, because the
erotic aim transcends its ostensible object.66 If sexual desire could be sexually real-
ized, the act of physical sex would lead to the annihilation of one or both of the lovers,
as Aristotle drily observed in his one allusion to this passage (Pol. ii 1262bl4-15; cf.
GA i 731al0-15), and so it would hold for us all the terror of Rilke’s angel at the start
of the Duino Elegies—that awesome, elaborately uninvoked presence in whose thrill-
ing and dread embrace we should instantly dissolve. But sexual intercourse is inade-
quate to the expression of sexual desire, according to this account: it is a stupid, clumsy
sort of groping towards that which is by definition ‘lost’ to it, a gross attempt to liter-
alize our longing for transpersonal union.
So much for erotic psychology. In the domain of metaphysics, Aristophanes’ speech
in the Symposium contains the first hint of Plato’s unprecedented and shattering dis-
covery that the genuine object of eros—whatever it is—does not belong to the same
order of reality as the objects intended by the human appetites. Instead of an empiri-
cal, bounded, localized, and therefore (theoretically, if not always actually) attainable
entity in the world, the object of eros turns out to be something more elusive, perhaps
ineffable; it can only be described by means of a mythopoeic image (‘one’s other half).
Erotics is not a science but a mystery: as Aristophanes emphasizes, the identity of
the object we truly desire whenever we are attracted to someone remains hidden from
us.67 It is, apparently, an idea or value of some sort (e.g., oikeiotes, or the sense of
belonging to oneself: Symp. 192cl) that mediates all individual, proximate objects of
desire and makes them instrumental to the eternally thwarted realization of an ideal
state of affairs (e.g., ‘wholeness’), thereby lending them a specious attractiveness which
they in turn focus or reflect to those who desire them.
The immense conceptual gulf that separates Aristophanes’ view of eros from the
traditional Greek outlook is already plain. Eros can no longer be classed together with
hunger and thirst among the desires capable of satisfaction: the ‘whole’ which
Aristophanes’ lovers seek is not only physically inaccessible to them; its attainment
lies under the eternal interdict of the gods. Eros is, therefore, an endless, unterminat-
ing, perpetual desire. Although in any specific instance my eros may appear to be
focused or fixated on an empirical entity outside myself—namely, my beloved (whether
conceived as a ‘whole person’ or simply as a ‘body’)—it cannot be consummated by
possessing that entity because its true aim is not the simple acquisition of its desired
object but a self-transcending union with it.68 That goal endows sexual desire with
its obsessiveness but forever eludes mere sexuality.
The function of Aristophanes’ myth within the larger design of Plato’s argument
in the Symposium can be characterized in both negative and positive terms: on the
one hand, it demolishes the conventional Greek conception of eros as an appetite and
thereby clears the ground on which Diotima will later erect the intellectual edifice
of her erotic theory; on the other hand, it renders some of the central tenets of that
theory accessible to a general audience by rehearsing them in a poetic (or, at least,
non-discursive) form. One need hardly subscribe to a transcendental ontology, after
all, in order to recognize in Aristophanes’ myth an accurate and compelling descrip-
170

tion of what it feels like to be powerfully attracted to someone, and so the myth pro-
vides the non-philosophical reader with a basis in ordinary human experience for
initiation into the mystery of Platonic erotics. Plato, in effect, secures our assent in
advance to Diotima’s account of human sexuality by embedding her premises in a
symbolic transcript of the workings of our erotic psychology. In this way he persuades
us to accept the myth’s philosophical implications before we have become fully aware
of what they are; he manages to suggest—without, however, venturing as yet to specify
it—something about the very nature of passionate sexual desire that cries out for a
metaphysical explanation.
HI
Plato is the first person on record to distinguish sharply and clearly between sexual
appetite and sexual desire.69 ‘Appetite’ and ‘desire’, as I understand those terms
(stipulatively, though not—I trust—improperly), differ from one another chiefly in
this respect: appetite refers to a longing for pleasure (physical pleasure, most com-
monly) which aims at and is capable of achieving terminal gratification, usually by
means of possessing some object in the world; desire, by contrast, cannot be defini-
tively satisfied, certainly not by acquiring its object, because it is aroused by a per-
ception of value in things and so neither terminates in nor is fully consummated by
the possession of any concrete entity. Every passionate longing for sexual union with
a particular human being qualifies as a genuine instance of desire, in Plato’s view,
because the very intensity, exclusivity, and ultimate futility of such a passion point
to the presence, in the beloved, of a cherished value or idea logically distinct from
and ontologically independent of the particular individual who happens to instantiate
it. Hence, all immediate objects of sexual desire are at best instrumental and at worst
illusory or unreal (as Aristophanes’ myth implies), since what sexual desire aims to
realize is an ideal state of affairs (e.g., ‘wholeness’) whose defining features have been
identified in advance by the lover’s soul and are but tenuously connected to the empirical
world of separate and autonomous objects—objects which glimmer momentarily with
significance as desire passes over them.
Plato is the first theorist of desire in this sense. He must therefore be reckoned the
founder, or at least the precursor, of the intellectual traditions and critical methodolo-
gies which have come into prominence in our own age. The concept of desire as an
endless longing that seeks not to satisfy but to perpetuate itself figures importantly
in philosophical phenomenology from Hegel onwards; it has been popularized recently
by French theoreticians such as Lacan, Barthes, and Rend Girard. Plato’s ‘depth
psychology’—his denial of any strict or necessary correspondence between the proxi-
mate and the ultimate objects and aims of sexual desire—should be congenial to Freu- fg
dians of every complexion, and Plato’s Aristophanes would appear to be in sympathy
with those recent psychoanalytic revisionists who hold that all desire originates in
infantile experiences of separation and loss.70 Plato, however, does not go quite so
for: Diotima will reveal that the authentic goal of erds, though in some sense internal
to the lover, is no psychological phantom (or ‘self-object’) but is ontologically grounded I
in reality.
Underlying Plato’s distinction between sexual appetite and sexual desire, as we shall
see, is a philosophical anatomy of human motivation that differentiates two basic types
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or kinds of longing, corresponding respectively to what I have been calling appetite

and desire, namely, the appetitive and the erotic, we have been concerned hitherto
with the distinction between appetite and desire, between the appetitive and the erotic,
only as it shapes and informs Plato’s outlook on sexuality. The foregoing discussion
has, therefore, not been intended to imply that Plato is interested principally in the
sexual manifestation of eras, however conceived, or that the chief purpose of his erotic
doctrine is to provide a philosophically adequate analysis of the intentionality of sex-
ual desire. Rather, it is we today, Plato’s modem interpreters, who—despite the drift
of our own intellectual traditions—tend to conceive erotic desire almost exclusively
in sexual terms. In order to close the gap which has opened between Plato’s outlook
on eros and our own, and in order not to lose sight of the experiential basis of Plato’s
erotic theory, it is necessary to emphasize the descriptive, psychosexual dimension
of the Platonic eros—just as Plato prepares the unwary reader for Diotima’s theoreti-
cal exposition by prefacing it with Aristophanes’ mythopoeic parable. Far from being
essentially sexual in Plato’s thinking, the erotics of personal attraction may simply
reflect, on the individual level, the operation of the universal bond that holds the entire
cosmos together {Symp. 202e);71 in attempting to lift Plato’s erotic theory out of its
larger context in his philosophical system we may well be perpetrating a kind of vio-
lence upon it. If, however, we allow Plato’s erotic doctrine to remain submerged in
its philosophical context, we are liable to neglect those features of it which account
for its evidently urgent and pressing claims on the attention of modem readers.
My assumption throughout this paper, then, is not that Platonic eros must be con-
ceived wholly and exclusively as sexual desire but that, whatever else it may be, Pla-
tonic erds does indeed also make sense as an analysis of the intentionality of sexual
desire and demands to be taken seriously as such. For Plato, of course, the emphasis
falls not on sexual desire but on sexual desire: that is, on erotic desire in its sexual
manifestation (which is, to be sure, but a single species—merely one of the various
manifestations or expressions—of erotic desire).72 If one wished to avoid the appear-
ance of violating the norms of ordinary linguistic usage by attaching stipulated, tech-
nical meanings to common words, one might substitute for the distinction I have drawn
between sexual appetite and sexual desire an equivalent distinction between the two
types of longing (or ‘desire’ in the non-technical sense) that manifest themselves in
the realm of sexual life: an appetitive longing (desireA), corresponding to what I have
been calling ‘appetite’, and an erotic longing (desireE), corresponding to what I have
been calling ‘desire’ proper. In what follows I shall invoke desireA and desireE when-
ever the use of ‘sexual desire’ is likely to create ambiguities. Our present task must
be to define rather more precisely both the appetitive and the erotic versions of sexual
longing, as Plato conceives them: What exactly are sexual desireA and sexual desireE?
In the Symposium (204d-206a) Diotima distinguishes her notion of eros from the
popular conception by arguing that erotic objects are desired for the sake of a good,
either real or perceived. In the Republic (437d-439b), by contrast, Socrates explicates
the nature of appetite—or epithymia, in Plato’s Greek—by arguing that thirst itself
is not a desire for good drink but simply for drink.73 The basic difference between
eros and epithymia as Plato conceptualizes them (in those two passages, at least) is
the difference between a good-dependent and a good-independent desire:74 erotic desire
incorporates an implicit, positive value-judgment about its object, whereas appetitive
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desire expresses no such judgment—it merely aims at the gratification of a need (bodily
replenishment, in the case of thirst), whether such gratification actually constitutes
a good thing for the agent in the context of his present circumstances or not. The
paradigmatic examples of epithymia in Plato’s writings are hunger, thirst, and simi-
lar, pre-reflective physical needs (Gorg. 494b-c, 496c-497c, 504e-505a, 517d-519a;
Resp. 437b-439d, 475b-c, 558d-559d; Phlb. 34d-35d; Tim. 70d-71b)—those needs which
drive the soul ‘like a beast’ to obtain satisfaction, as Socrates colorfully remarks in
the Republic (439b4; cf. Xenophon, Hiero 7.1-3). Although elsewhere in the same
work Plato expands the epithymetic category to include other good-independent desires
besides physical urges—e.g., corpse-gazing, in the case of Leontius (439e-440a), and
money-making, in the case of the oligarchic man (580d-581a)75—epithymia in its original
formulation is a brute impulse, like the heroin addict’s desire for a fix;76 according
to this conception, the sexual manifestation of epithymia (properly called aphrodisia
[<*9po8toia] at 580e5, euphemistically TO 8e o> epa at 439d6)77 would be the blind urge
to copulate, an instinctual drive to obtain the sexual pleasure afforded by genital stimu-
lation and release.78
Plato’s conceptualization of eros and epithymia has several important consequences
for his moral psychology. Whereas, first of all, the aim of eros is the actualization
of a good, the aim of epithymia is the achievement of hedone, by which Plato signi-
fies the terminal gratification of a need (Gorg. 494a-507e, Phlb. 34c-40d): by hedone
we may understand ‘pleasure’, then, only if by ‘pleasure’ we do not mean something
apart from, or over and above, the satisfaction of an appetite.79 Socrates illustrates
appetitive intentionality in the Gorgias (494c-e) by likening epithymia to the urge to
scratch an itch.80 In the Charmides (167e), accordingly, the interlocutors agree—
platitudinously enough—that the goal of epithymia is hedone, but the object of eros
is ta kala (‘the beautiful’); similarly, in the Hippias Major (297e-304a) Socrates argues
that sensual gratification produces TO T)8U (‘the pleasant’) but not to kalon. Just as
Plato’s prime examples of epithymia are hunger and thirst, so his favorite instances
of hedone are eating and drinking (Prot. 337c; Phdo. 64d, 81b; Phlb. 31e-32c), and
he frequently pairs hedone with epithymia (Lach. 191d-e; Gorg. 484d, 491d; Phdo.
81b, 83b; Symp. 196c, 207e; Resp. 430e, 431b-d, 559c, 571b; Tim. 86c; Laws 647d,
714a, 782e, 802b, 864b, 886a-b: cf. Phdr. 237d-238c; Aristotle, EN 1148a22, PA 661a7-9;
Plutarch, Mor. 1506), almost as if one word were conceptually incomplete without
the other.81 These semantic patterns and associations take on additional, philosophi-
cal significance in the light of Plato’s tendency, evident as early as the Gorgias
(500b-502c), to argue that it is possible to pursue gratification independently of the
good; indeed, he sometimes appears to elevate the drive to hedone into a rival motiva-
tional principle—despite the implicit damage that does to the Socratic Paradox that
no one errs willingly.82
The predominant element in an erotic desire is the object, which holds out to the
lover the promise of something good; the predominant element in an appetitive desire,
by contrast, is the imperative to gratify a need, that is, the epithymetic aim which
can be realized by means of any one of a number of possible objects. Hence, erotic
! desires are laigely object-oriented, whereas appetitive desires are laigely aim-oriented.
The description of the intensional object of an appetitive desire, in other words, makes
essential reference to the desire in question, whereas the description of the intensional
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object of an erotic desire does not. In order to specify the proper object of an agent’s
unreflective thirst, for example, it is both necessary and sufficient, on this account,
to refer merely to ‘the thirst-quenching’ or, just possibly (though I do not follow this
line of reasoning here) to ‘the good qua thirst-quenching’; the relevant goodness of
an erotic object, however, cannot be fully specified solely in terms of its aptness as
a vehicle for the agent’s gratification. Thus, I desireA this glass of water because I
believe it will quench my thirst, but I desireE my beloved because I find my beloved
beautiful (where the meaning of ‘beautiful’ is not exhaustively defined as ‘that prop-
erty of my beloved which satisfies my desireE for him/her’).
To put the matter somewhat differently, appetitive desires are content-generic: they
do not intend particularized objects. To be sure, appetites are normally directed to
local, empirical objects (e.g., I desire to drink this glass of water because I am thirsty),
but they are not excited by particular objects: they arise, rather, in response to needs
which can be satisfied indifferently by any member of a more generalized class of
things. If it is true that insofar as I am purely and simply thirsty (if I ever am) I
desire* not good drink but simply drink, then it follows that I do not desire* this or
that drink in particular except insofar as it is a drink and thereby answers to my need
for bodily replenishment (cf. Resp. 437d-e). In any given situation, to be sure, I gratify
my thirst by drinking this drink—whatever drink it is that I do drink—and, of course,
I also desire* the drink that I do drink. But I do not desire it in all its irreducible
specificity or individuality—such that, in other words, if you take away my drink and
give me another one just like it, I make a tremendous fuss—the point is that any old
drink will do. (Such substitutions are not likely to work in the case of my beloved,
however.) Sexual desire*, if we follow out this logic, would be something on the order
of Kinsey’s notion of an unmediated impulse to sexual gratification irrespective of
the object by means of which such gratification is procured, an impulse stemming
from ‘the capacity of an individual to respond erotically [by which Kinsey means ‘with
appetitive sexual desire’] to any sort of stimulus.’83 By contrast, any desire which
intends a specific object such that its conditions of satisfaction allow no substitutions
necessarily implies a positive valuation of the desired object on the agent’s part-
more positive, at least, than merely ‘good qua gratifying’—and, therefore, qualifies
as an erotic desire.84 Indeed, the more exclusive the fixation, the more we, along with
Plato, are inclined to explain it by appealing to an ‘erotic’ factor—that is, by trian-
gulating from the desiring subject and the desired object to some tertium quid distinct
from both subject and object which lends value to the object in the subject’s estima-
tion and thereby mediates exclusive object-choice. No individual object can furnish
in and of itself an exhaustive account of its own overriding attractiveness.
Thus, my preference for a particular pencil, although I have many pencils on my
desk which write equally well, has something fetishistic about it. By calling that prefer-
ence ‘fetishistic’, we signify that the ground of the valuation placed upon the individual
object by the agent is obscure, inasmuch as the agent values the object in excess of—
and out of all proportion to—its practical usefulness or innate attractiveness; there-
fore, the valuation placed upon the desired object can be explained only by reference
to some other locus of value on which the agent draws in endowing the particular
object with a meaning extrinsic to it. In order to account for the agent’s overvaluation
of an individual object, in other words, we are obliged to hypothesize that the desired
174

object manifests to the agent an idea or value which he prizes and which by virtue
of its instantiation in the object of his desire ‘causes’ (i.e., supplies a reason for) him
to fixate on it in particular. Without the ghostly intervention of a value-laden erotic
factor in the business of selecting an object, the only considerations relevant to choosing
among a plurality of objects belonging to the same genus are utilitarian (convenience,
need, pleasure), and the agent’s intentional mode is consequently appetitive.85 But
to prefer one member of a more general class is to distinguish it implicitly as good.
Any content-specific desire must therefore be erotic—it cannot be merely appetitive.86
It is easy to understand why, on this account, the Lysianic speaker’s argument in the
Phaedrus—his denial of being erotically aroused—must, as Socrates hypothesizes
(237b), be a sham: the supposed me eron has, after all, set his sights on one boy in
particular (227c6), and his claim not to experience any erds is contradicted by the
lengths to which he goes in order to seduce the specific individual who has excited
his desire. Only if a lover achieves a measure of Platonic enlightenment, of profound
and necessary self-understanding, does he come to see the object of his erotic desire,
too, as content-generic in certain respects, and only then will he begin to relinquish
his exclusive fixation on it in particular (Symp. 210a8-b6: I shall examine this claim
more closely in section 5. below).
Sexual attraction expresses a genuinely erotic and not merely an appetitive desire,
according to Plato, whenever the sexual object is desired for the valued qualities it
manifests to the lover, not merely for its usefulness as an instrument of sexual pleas-
ure.87 Plato’s account of the ‘triangulation’88 implicit in all erotic desire, including
sexual desireE, is not simply a logical consequence of the structure of his
metaphysics: it also helps to explicate the nature of passionate sexual desire itself by
emphasizing the ‘mental factor’ at work in it.89 We are all fetishists in our erotic life
insofar as we tend to find certain isolated human features (such as a specific eye color)
more immediately appealing than others. Freud accounted for such preferences by
referring us to an erotic tertium quid in the form of internal objects, transferences,
invisible others, and the like; his famous dictum that the sexual act is a process in
«-
which four persons are involved reckons with the ghostly, triangulated object intended
by each lover in addition to the real individual who serves as his or her sexual part-
ner. Did not Proust also enunciate, and tirelessly illustrate, the precept that ‘ L’amour
le plus exclusifpour une personne est toujours I’amour d’autre chose'?90 Every pas-
sionate lover is necessarily an idealist, on this view, because sexual desireE is always
mediated by an idea or value in which the erotic object participates. So long as a sex-
ual desire is erotic and not merely appetitive, in other words, there is nothing essen-
tially or irreducibly sexual about it. The apparently sexual characteristics or qualities
of the desire result from the feet that the object in question can, in principle at least,
be sexually enjoyed and that the erotic value desired by the lover manifests itself in
a sensuous medium. But this feet about the object and the medium of its value does
not determine the intentional structure of the lover’s desire: it does not explain why
what might simply have been an impulse for sexual gratification turns out instead to
be a passionate longing for something precious, a longing excited by the aura of value
surrounding and suffusing the sexual object—by those very aspects of it, in short,
that defy sexual possession. What is essential to sexual desireE, then, and what such
desire has in common with other kinds of erotic desire, is its mediation by an idea
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of the good.
Sexual desireE is erotic desire that for various reasons (some of which I shall con-
sider shortly) has become sexually thematized. But in being directed and attached
to sexual objects, it never forfeits its essentially erotic character. Even when the immedi-
ate object of sexual desireE is wholly physical, the lover’s response to it is not irredu-
cibly sexual:91 what thrills and fascinates me about the body of my beloved is not
any particular somatic feature per se but rather the implicit meaning or value which
the combination of those features expresses to me.92 If certain physical characteristics
appear to arouse my sexual desireE whenever I encounter them, they do so not
because they are naturally desirable in and of themselves but because they evoke in
me a set of private—though, no doubt, widely shared—associations. An object excites
sexual desireE if and only if it can accommodate the largely predetermined configu-
ration of ideas, values, and associations that comprise the lover’s erotic ideal and thereby
define for him the scope of what is attractive. That love is blind is an ancient truth;
Plato explains the blindness of desire by arguing that the lover cannot fully discern
the individuating features of his beloved in the dazzling light of the ulterior value which
his beloved focuses and reflects to him (cf. Phdr. 233b, 251a-253b; Resp. 474d-475a,
601b).
In no case, then, is an individual the terminal object of desire, whether such desire
be erotic or appetitive. Love or attachment to an individual object may perhaps be
philosophically perspicuous,93 but desire for an individual object in and of itself is
not. Thus, both the objects of epithymia and the objects of erds are fungible, accord-
ing to Plato; they are fungible, however, for quite different reasons: the objects of
appetite are samples, whereas the objects of erotic desire are instances or manifesta-
tions,94 What I desireA whenever I am thirsty is to drink a certain quantity of pota-
ble liquid in order to quench my thirst. I do not, to be sure, desire A the beverage I
drink for all its co-extensive properties (such as the property of being compounded
of hydrogen and oxygen): rather, I desireA it under the description of gratifying my
need for bodily replenishment. Hence, I may even fail to specify the precise content
of an appetitive object, asking my host simply for ‘something cold to drink’. The object
of such a request will turn out to be a sample of a stuff that is in fact widely dis-
tributed throughout the world; whatever answers, in any specific case, to my appeti-
tive desire for drink can be thought of as a quantity or sample of a ‘scattered object’—the
kind of object normally designated by a mass term95—because it is no less available
in the beer my host serves a fellow-guest than it is in the soda-water he serves me.
The few ounces of cold liquid I happen to drink in order to satisfy my thirst represent,
then, an actual sample of the scattered, potable stuff of which I desire to drink a cer-
tain quantity whenever I am thirsty.
But what I desireE whenever I am passionately attracted to an individual human
being is, by contrast, some valued quality which he or she manifests—or instantiates
—and thereby makes locally accessible to me. What attracts me to a particular
individual, in other words, is not in reality96 something unique to that individual but
is rather a combination of qualities or properties that can be abstracted, generalized,
and repeated in other human instances. Any person who similarly manifests the con-
stellation of qualities I cherish in my beloved is, therefore, an equally likely candidate
176

for erotic investment on my part, whether I realize it or not; once I have come to
understand my own motives a little better, I may even be able to disintoxicate myself
from infatuation with specific individuals altogether (cf. Symp. 210a8-b6).97 My
beloved, however, is not a sample or quantity of some cherished value (e.g., youthful-
ness), but an instance or manifestation of it. Youthfulness is not available to me in
him or her in the same way that a potable liquid is available to me in a beverage:
when I drink a glass of water I actually drink some water, whereas when I embrace
a youthful individual I do not actually embrace some youthfulness. The sample/instance
distinction thereby provides another way of explaining why appetitive desires can be
terminally gratified whereas erotic desires cannot. Every sample of drink fully pos-
sesses all the requisite features of the drink I desire to drink when I am thirsty, whereas
my beloved—no matter how cooperative-leaves me perpetually unsatisfied because
he or she merely manifests the youthful qualities I find so attractive and is not some
of what it is that I desire.98 A glass of water is also, to be sure, an instance of water—
i.e., an example of what it is to be water—but that is not the description under which
I desireA it when I am thirsty; similarly, even in the highly unlikely event that my
beloved could be construed as a quantity of youthful stuff, that is not the description
under which I desireE him or her when I am passionately attracted. Nor is my
beloved, for that matter, a perfect instance or manifestation of the quality I cherish:
my beloved’s youthfulness, for example, is not complete and unchanging, although
by the logic of my desire I may, like Bob Dylan, wish him or her to stay forever young.
The distinction between appetite and desire, as it applies to sexual intentionality,
enables Plato to escape the implication that every sexual impulse necessarily expresses
a transcendental erotic desire. Despite what Plato’s Aristophanes might have led us
to believe, sexual longing may be either good-dependent or good-independent: not
every sexual object is erotic in the intension of the lover. Insofar as it is erotic, how-
ever, it can be described as holding out to the lover the attraction of something good,
not merely something gratifying. Hence, the lover’s desire to hold on to it (‘fixation’),
a desire he never feels for a wholly appetitive object, which ceases to interest him
once his need for it has been terminally gratified.99 Sexual desire, then, can be genuinely
erotic, according to Plato, but by virtue of being erotic, of being a mediated desire,
it necessarily forfeits the possibility of achieving a fully sexual realization.
TV
Is there a single idea or value that mediates all forms of erosl Despite Plato’s fre-
quent and radical departures from traditional Greek assumptions about the intention-
ality of sexual desire, he does not hesitate to enlist conventional notions in support
of his own theory whenever they can be made to harmonize with it. Although his
understanding of the ultimate aim of eros is highly original, as we shall see, his defi-
nition of its ultimate object is so commonsensical (by Athenian standards) as to require
little justification or defense—and therefore, apparently, no argumentation. For the
Greeks tended to conceive eros as a response to the stimulus of visual beauty, and
Plato simply borrows from his contemporaries the customary formulation of the erotic
object—although, to be sure, he understands the significance and ontological status
of ‘beauty’ in an unprecedented way. Thus, Diotima agrees with the unreconstructed
Socrates that eros is a desire for the beautiful (204d3); she teaches that physical beauty
is what in the first instance attracts the desiring lover: if a beautiful body has a beauti-
ful and well-formed soul in it, so much the better (τά xt ούν σώματα τα καλά μάλλον
ή τά αισχρά άσπάζεται άτε κυών, καί αν έντύχη ψυχή καλή και γενναία καί εύφυεΐ, πάνυ
δή άσπάζεται τό συναμφότερον: 209a-b; cf. Resp. 402d-e). Similarly, in the Phaedrus
Socrates describes erotic mania as triggered by the glimpse of a face or bodily form
that reflects beauty (όταν θεοειδές πρόσωπον ίδη κάλλος εύ μεμιμημένον ή τινα σώματος
ιδέαν: 251a;100 cf. Plutarch, Plat. Quaest. 6, 1004c: κάλλους δέ τοΰ περί τό σώμα ό
έρως). In the Cratylus Socrates playfully etymologizes eros to mean ‘influx through
the eyes’ (420a-b), a gloss which reappears—freighted with philosophical
significance—in the Phaedrus myth (255c-d).
Plato provisionally agrees with his contemporaries, then, in regarding eros as a
response to the stimulus of visual beauty, but he strenuously disagrees with them about
the nature of that response. Such is the point of Diotima’s crucial and much-neglected101
distinction between the object and the aim of erotic desire:102 Eros is not for the
beautiful, Socrates, as you suppose.” “What is it, then?” “It is for birth and procre-
ation in the beautiful’” (206e). Leaving aside for the moment what Diotima means
by ‘birth and procreation in the beautiful’, we must first examine the consequences
of her denial that eros is a desire for beauty. As her later, celebrated account of the
Platonic lover’s contemplative ascent to the Form of the Beautiful makes clear, Diotima
does not intend to repudiate in the passage I have just quoted the common notion,
which she elsewhere espouses, that beauty is the ultimate object of eros: indeed, she
has already admitted that eros has something to do with beauty; it is all about beauty,
as she rather cagily puts it (“Ερως δ’ έστίν έρως περί το καλόν: 204b3; cf. 203c4, 206el).
Her insistence that eros is a desire for ‘birth and procreation in the beautiful’ does
not bear at all on the identity of the erotic object. Rather, in the passage quoted above
Diotima is speaking entirely to the question of the erotic aim—that is, she is attempt-
ing to specify what the lover wants his erotic object for, what he wishes to do with
it or to accomplish by means of it.103
The purpose behind Diotima’s refusal to call eros a desire for the beautiful tout
court is to avoid the otherwise inescapable implication that erotic desire aims at the
possession of beautiful things. For in the context of contemporary Athenian attitudes
to sexual behavior (to say nothing of ordinary language, whether English or Greek),
to define eros simply as a desire for the beautiful would be to specify its aim as well
as its object and, thus, to characterize it implicitly as an acquisitive passion, a long-
ing for the physical possession of a beautiful object—to construe it, in other words,
as an appetite for beauty. That is precisely where the youthful Socrates went wrong
when Diotima initially interrogated him. "Eros', she had conceded, ‘is of such a nature
and parentage and is a desire for the beautiful, as you say. But suppose someone were
to ask us, “What is eros for the beautiful, Socrates and Diotima?” To put it more
clearly: the lover desires the beautiful; what does he desire?’ The first part of Diotima’s
reformulated query refers to the erotic object, the second to the erotic aim; Socrates
conflates the two and answers, predictably enough, that the lover of beauty desires
‘to have it’. Diotima has to find a way of communicating to Socrates that beauty, though
related in some fashion to the true aim of eros, does not exhaust the purpose of erotic
desire; it is not the solution to the problem of erotic intentionality but an invitation
178

to further inquiry. ‘Your answer still yearns’, she says, ‘for another question
[erotesis],104 such as this one: What will whoever acquires the beautiful obtain?’ (204d).
To this Socrates cannot reply. Beauty may be what elicits our desire but its acquisition
is not the ultimate goal of the desire it arouses: it merely describes a horizon of possi-
bility. We still need to ask why we should desire beauty so passionately: Whatever
do we want it for?
Plato’s Aristophanes, though rather vague about the ultimate object of erotic desire,
was perfectly clear about its aim. He was quite prepared, that is, to specify what the
lover wants his beloved for: erds is the desire and pursuit of the whole, Aristophanes
said; it is the striving for a self-transcending union with one’s ‘other half (or with
whoever possesses the requisite complementary features and thereby re-presents, or
‘symbolizes’, it). According to Diotima, however, adherents to the ‘Aristophanic’ theory
of erds have made at least one crucial mistake: in laying so much stress on the ‘innate-
ness’ and ‘naturalness’ of the desire for union, they apparently lost sight of the need
to specify the further aim of that desire, to explain why the lover wants to be united
with his other half, and so they stopped short of a full elucidation of the erotic aim.
To be sure, Aristophanes did imply, correctly, that erds is mediated by an idea or value
that makes the proximate objects of the lover’s erds desirable to the lover in the first
place, and he even hinted at the content of that idea or value: it evidently has to do
with complementarity, in his view, with what will make good the lack or deficiency
in human nature—with, in a word, oikeiotes (192cl), the quality of being a part of,
or belonging intimately to, oneself. That objects of desire can indeed be properly
described as oikeios, ‘one’s own,’ is a philosophical commonplace familiar to readers
of Plato’s Lysis.105 But Aristophanes neglected to define the essential constituents of
oikeiotes·, he failed to analyze the ethical principle that governs the pursuit of what-
ever is one’s own, and in that respect his account was unsatisfactory. ih -
According to one logos, [Diotima pointedly remarks,] lovers are
those who seek their other halves. My logos claims that erds is
of neither half nor whole unless, my friend, it happen to be good
in some way, since people are willing to have even their own feet
and hands cut off if they think their own are bad. So I don’t think
that everyone cherishes what is his own except insofar as he calls
the good oikeios and his own, the bad alien. Thus, people desire
[erosi] nothing else but the good (Symp. 205d-206a).
Diotima’s approach to erds complements Socrates’ account of epithymia in the Republic,
where considerable care is taken to show that Diotima’s argument about erotic objects
does not apply to appetitive intentionally: ‘Let no one then’, Socrates cautions Glau-
con, ‘disconcert us when off our guard with the objection that everybody desires not
drink but good drink and not food but good food, because, the argument will run,
all men desire the good, and so, if thirst is desire, it would be of good drink or of
good whatsoever it is, and so similarly of other desires’ (438a; trans. Shorey). Glau-
con, however, is disconcerted by this apparent objection, and Socrates takes some time
to dispose of it.
Glaucon’s momentary confusion may have Socratic origins. For the line of argu-
ment that Socrates abandons, when discussing appetitive objects in the Republic, and
that Diotima espouses, when discussing erotic objects in the Symposium, is favored
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by the Socrates of Plato’s ‘early’ dialogues, such as the Meno (77b-78b), when dis-
cussing the psychology of ethical choice. It is typical of Socrates to argue, as John
Beversluis notes, that objects are not desired simpliciter, they are desired, rather, under
the description of contributing to the agent’s well-being (or eudaimonia).106 Simi-
larly, Diotima implies that erotic objects are desired both for the sake of a good which
the agent wishes to achieve (e.g., health) and because they are good themselves. Like
Plato’s Aristophanes (193c3, 193d5) in this respect, she concludes that the ultimate
aim of eros is to achieve eudaimonia (204e-205a, 205d2), which she construes as
the lover’s perpetual possession of the good (206all-12, 207a2).
But there is a difference between desiring something for the sake of a good and
desiring it because it is good. That difference, I shall argue, is reducible, at least in
part, to the distinction I have been employing between the aim and the object of erotic
desire. To desire an object x for the sake of a final good F is to make the possession
or actualization of F the ultimate aim of the desire for .t, whereas to desire x because
x is F (i.e., because x has the property F) is to identify F as the property of x that
makes x desirable in itself and that must therefore be reckoned the ultimate object
of desire in the desire for x (except, of course, where F stands for the property ‘con-
tributes to the final good G').107 Plato differentiates these two aspects of erotic desire
by distinguishing the lover’s boulesis from his eros proper (Symp. 204d-205a)—by
distinguishing, that is, what the lover wants (i.e., his aim) from what he is attracted
to or desires (i.e., his object). Wanting, or erotic desirew, implies an ulterior aim:
whenever I say that I desirew x, what I really mean is that I want to 9 x (where JC
is the direct object of an active verb 9),108 and ep-ing therefore represents the immedi-
ate, or proximate, aim of my desirew for x. But there is also a hierarchy of aims; I
want everything I want for the sake of something else. Hence, Socrates argues in the
Gorgias (467c-468c, 499e-500a) that boulesis ultimately aims not at the thing wanted
but at that for the sake of which the thing wanted is wanted—namely, the good.109
By contrast, eros proper, or desireP, need have no ulterior aim whatsoever; it can
refer merely to the experience of finding an object endlessly attractive, fascinating,
admirable, or valuable in some respect, such as in respect of physical beauty (in the
case of sexual desireE).110
The conceptual differences between desirew and desireP can be more easily grasped
by means of the following example. Suppose I see a particular antique violin and con-
ceive a longing for it. The violin evidently represents something valuable to me, but
there are at least two different modes of desiring that can be invoked to explain the
positive valuation I have placed upon it. I may desirew the violin, in which case I
probably want to own it and play it: that is the proximate aim of my desirew. Ulti-
mately, however, I desirew the violin because, say, I aim to be a better musician (own-
ing the violin will enable me to play better) and being a good musician is a constituent
of my eudaimonia, my well-being or happiness (which signifies the good-for-me).
The good is therefore that for the sake of which I desirew the violin; the violin is
desiredw under the description of contributing to my eudaimonia. What I ultimately
desirew, then, is not the violin but eudaimonia, my own well-being. By contrast, I
may desire the same violin not because I want to own it and play it and (ultimately)
be happy, but because I am attracted to it and admire it for some quality or property
that it possesses. The violin remains the same, but it has now become the object of
my desireP and so is desired under a different description. Let’s say that I now desire
the violin because it is an extraordinarily fine piece of craftsmanship. In this second
case, what I ultimately value is fine craftsmanship, not the violin itself: I desireP the
violin because it manifests to me a certain cherished quality, not because I have any
ulterior aim I wish to achieve by means of it (in neither case, then, is the violin itself
the terminal object of my desire); indeed, I can desireP the violin without wishing
to own it or even knowing how to play it. Hence, I can desireP something I do not
desirew—e.g., my best friend’s wife; similarly, I can desirew something I do not
desireP—e.g., major surgery, to cite Diotima’s example. The good featured in a good-
dependent desire can therefore function in at least two different ways, according to
whether it represents (1) that for the sake of which we desirew what we desirew, or
(2) the quality or value instantiated in what we desireP.
The kind of good that is the ultimate object of desirew Plato calls to agathon (‘the
good’), whereas the kind of good that is the ultimate object of desireP he calls to
kalon (‘the beautiful’).111 In the Gorgias (467e-468c, 499e-500a) Socrates argues that
the telos (499e8), the end or ultimate object, of all boulesis is to agathon. Similarly,
in the Symposium, the telos of the lover’s boulesis (205a3)—i.e., what the lover ulti-
mately wants, the final object of his desirew—is eudaimonia. which consists in his
possession of ta agatha (205al, 6-7). But the final object of the lover’s eros proper,
of his desireP, remains to kalon, just as the object of epithymia remains hedone (the
same tripartition and distribution of the objects of desire can also be found at Chrm.
167e). The ultimate aim of erotic desire, then, is the lover’s perpetual possession of
the good (Symp. 206a) and its ultimate object is the beautiful.112
How does Plato explain the relation between the ultimate aim and the ultimate object
of erotic desire? How does an understanding of our desirew for the perpetual pos-
session of the good help to elucidate our desireP for beauty? Diotima’s doctrine of
erotic procreation is designed to supply the necessary connection. Her logic is well
known113 and can be quickly summarized. What we ultimately want is (1)
eudaimonia—or, the perpetual possession of the good; desirew for the perpetual pos-
session of the good entails (2) desirew for immortality; the necessary condition of
achieving immortality is (3) the production (‘procreation’) of arete, ‘virtue’ or ‘excel-
lence’. Only by producing true arete, by instantiating perfect virtue in our souls, can
we achieve eudaimonia. Here is the point at which beauty fits into Diotima’s scheme
and guarantees that her model of human aspiration is not merely ethical but also erotic:
in order to give birth to arete we require the inspirational presence of beauty. ‘All
men are pregnant’,114 Diotima declares, ‘but our nature cannot give birth in ugliness,
only in beauty’ (206c; cf. 209b: έν τώ γάρ αισχρώ ουδέποτε γεννήσει), and she follows
up her statement with an almost embarrassingly anatomical image describing how we
shrink from the presence of ugliness (206d).115 We need beauty in order to procreate,
to motivate us properly, and only desire can bring us into the presence of beauty116—it
is an utter sophistry to maintain that we can seek beauty without desiring it, led purely
by a δόξα έπί τό αριστον λόγω αγουσα, a ‘judgement guiding us rationally towards what
is best’, as Socrates fleetingly pretends in the Phaedrus (237e; trans. Hackforth).117
Arete is thus the vehicle by means of which we express our desire for what we value.
Sexual desireE, inasmuch as it is excited by the presence of beauty in an object, is
continuous with the contemplative philosopher’s desire for transcendental Beauty, a
desire which if successful issues in the production of true arete (cf. Symp. 212a): under
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Diotima’s description, therefore, ethics and erotics are the same science.
It might seem that at some point in the course of constructing this argument Diotima
has in effect diverted her efforts from the task of analyzing the intentionality of erds
to that of formulating the axioms of moral psychology or ethical theory. Indeed, Diotima
appears to confirm that impression when she numbers gymnastics, commerce, phi-
losophy, and all other human activities that aim at some good among the forms or
expressions of erds (205d). But, as we have seen, there is a specific sense in which
the pursuit of all such activities can and must qualify as erotic: they do not possess
in themselves a natural, self-evident ground of attractiveness such that devotion to
them is universal or automatic; the valuation placed upon them by those who pursue
them is no more self-explanatory than the valuation placed upon a beloved object by
its lover. In order to account for the particular path which anyone chooses to follow
in pursuing the good, we need to specify what that person values—i.e., what things
manifest beauty to him, or ‘attract’ him. The gymnast does not exercise merely for
the pleasure of working out, on this view; he exercises because for some mysterious
reason gymnastics is attractive (or ‘beautiful’) to him: it represents to him a valuable,
meaningful way of living his life.118 It is an activity well-suited to expressing his desire
for what he values, in that it provides him with a means of translating his personal,
erotic vision of beauty into an ‘image of excellence’ (cf. Symp. 212a4), a form of last-
ing achievement. Gymnastics properly qualifies as an expression of erds, in short,
whenever it functions as a vehicle of personal arete. What Diotima is trying to eluci-
date, then, is not only our motive for wanting the things that we value but also for
valuing the things that we do. Beauty, she concludes, contributes an essential element
to the way or activity (tropos, praxis) by which we set about to possess the good for-
ever (206b), for it causes us to cherish (aoirdCecrOai: 205e6; cf. 192a5, 192b5, 209b5)
whatever enables us to give birth to arete\ it thereby motivates us to possess the good
and so conduces to our eudaimonia.
Erds is not acquisitive but creative.119 It is a desire that aims in the first instance
at giving birth, and thereby at possessing the good forever, not at the acquisition, pos-
session, and consumption of beauty. We cannot have beauty in any case: we can only
have beautiful objects, but having them will not satisfy our desireP for beauty. I can-
not, for example, satisfy any more effectively the desireP aroused in me by the sight
of Velazquez’s ‘The Drunkards’ by taking it home and hanging it in my living room
than I can by viewing it in the Prado, for the mere fact of owning the physical art
object will not put me in more direct possession of the cherished quality that causes
me to desireP the painting in the first place, though I may still want (i.e., desire w)
the painting for a variety of reasons; desirew, however, ultimately aims not at the pos-
session of beautiful things but at the possession—indeed, at the perpetual possession—of
good things, and so the mere possession of beautiful objects will not satisfy my
desirew, unless it is also good for me to have them. To surrender forever the posses-
sion of the good in order to acquire a beautiful object would indeed be like trading
gold for bronze, to borrow Socrates’ Homeric analogy (Symp. 219a)—or, to employ
a different one, it would be like exchanging the fate of Odysseus for that of Menelaus,
abandoning marriage with Penelope in order to live perpetually with Helen. Dante’s
Paolo and Francesca illustrate the dire consequences of preferring the beauty that one
desires to the good that one wants: only after they have been eternally united in a
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virtually ‘Aristophanic’ fusion do the two lovers discover that there does in truth exist
something else that they would much rather have than one another.
Beauty, then, is not the goal in which our erotic desirew terminates; rather, it is
a stimulus to new activity. No beautiful object, not even beauty itself, contains within
it everything we seek: the telos of our striving lies as much within us as outside us,
and beauty furnishes us with an opportunity to give birth to what already quickens
within our souls.120 By teaching that the proximate aim of eros is procreation, instead
of possession (as the conventional Greek conception of eros as an appetite would have
implied), Diotima deflects erotic desire from all objects of temporary, partial gratifi-
cation and thereby places its goals beyond the empirical individuals in any specific
erotic relationship just as surely as Aristophanes did by claiming that what eros seeks
is the lost primaeval union. Eros is an endless desire, in Diotima’s view, not only
because the beauty which evokes desire is a transcendental entity but also because
the immediate aim of eros is not gratification but creativity, an ongoing and eternal
urge to make what is best in us a perpetually living force.121 Unlike the acquisitive
response to beauty—which makes of the beloved object something that has to be swal-
lowed whole, so to speak, and which, as the case of Alcibiades demonstrates, excuses
the lover from any obligation to change his own nature—the procreative response
vouches for the radically transformative power of eros. Despite its apparent fixation
on the beloved object, the lover’s desire aims in fact at a liberation and release of
his own creative energies. Eros is thus the desire to realize an objective potential in
the self.122
V
There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as physical attraction, according to Plato:
bodies, after all, are not attracted to other bodies;123 as Auden wrote, Our bodies
cannot love, but without them, What works of love could we do?’ Bodies may have
needs which they drive us to gratify, but they are not the source of our attraction to
individual objects. It is the human soul that desires the beauty in bodies, and it does
so in order to create, to produce excellence.124 If Diotima is correct, what I most crave
(consciously or unconsciously) even from a beautiful body is not an opportunity to
lose myself in its materiality but an opportunity to realize myself by apprehending
its beauty.125 The impulse to creativity and self-realization draws me towards beauti-
ful bodies, but what actually evokes my desire is not any particular body per se but
the beauty it incarnates, the beauty in—or, as Plato rather dissociatively puts it, ‘upon’
(i.e., borne by)—the body (τό κάλλος τό έπι ότωοΰν σώματι . . . τό έπ’ ειδει καλόν
. . . τό έπι πάσιν τοις σώμασι κάλλος—Symp. 210a-b; τον τό κάλλος εχοντα—Phdr. 252a-
b). I desireE the body of my beloved only insofar as it is the medium or vehicle of
beauty—not qua body, then, but qua beautiful—though if it were not a body my desire
for the beauty in it would not be a sexual desireE.126 The sexual component in eros,
in other words, is not a necessary consequence of the beloved’s beauty but of the cor-
poreal medium through which that beauty manifests itself. Any lover who sets about
to translate his supposed physical attraction into sexual activity has in effect substituted
the body of his beloved for the beauty in it that attracts him and has thus doomed
himself to an enslaving (Symp. 210d3; cf. 219e3-4) and frustrating obsession. For inas-
much as his goal is something corporeal the sexual lover no longer intends a real object
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but a wraith, an eidolon: he has become an idolator,127 and his longing is directed
at a phantom such as the gods sent to Troy in place of Helen (according to some ver-
sions of the myth) to be an empty focus of contention and strife (Resp. 586b-c).128
It so happens that human beauty is always composite: it dwells in bodies, in souls,
and in combinations thereof, and is inevitably mixed up with all sorts of ‘mortal trash’,
as Diotima loftily calls it (211e);129 it is encrusted with the ‘shell and weed and rock’
(Resp. 611d)130 of material contingency. In our own embodied and sensuous condi-
tion, therefore, it is virtually impossible for us to isolate the beauty that we desire,
and that we need in order to produce true excellence, from any single human instance
or manifestation of it: that is the ground of the false consciousness whereby we per-
sistently treat objects of erotic desire as unique and irreplaceable entities instead of
what they really are—namely, instances of universal and generalizable properties. If
one’s entire erotic horizon is bounded by one beautiful body, it will not be possible
to desire solely the beauty in that body and not also the body incarnating it (although
in actuality it is only the beauty in the body and not the body itself that evokes desire,
as Diotima’s analysis shows). For the beauty of any particular body, as the lover sees
it, is inseparable—both practically and psychologically—from the physical particu-
lars which combine to express it, and for that reason the ‘accidental’ (i.e., corporeal
and personal) characteristics of the beloved come to represent in themselves an object
of desire in the conscious life of the lover. Beauty transfigures the individual features
of the person who instantiates it. That is why all desire for the beauty of human bod-
ies tends to include an element of sexual longing, even on Plato’s account, despite
his insistence that beauty per se is not the object of a specifically sexual desireE. For
beauty informs the whole body in which it dwells with a sense of value, a sense of
something far more deeply interfused, and thereby makes the body desirable in all
its particularity. The beloved’s personal features may similarly qualify for erotic invest-
ment on the lover’s part, although they do so—whatever he may think—only insofar
as they are beautiful (or, perhaps, insofar as they form part of a beautiful whole: Resp.
474c-475b).
Hence, Plato’s view of personal relations does not, in fact, suffer from what some
of Vlastos’ critics have taken to be the chill consequences of his well-known claim
that ‘Plato’s theory is not, and is not meant to be, about personal love for persons.
. . . What it is really about is love for place-holders of the predicates “useful” and
“beautiful”—of the former when it is only philia, of the latter, when it is erds.'x31
Now, to elucidate the intentional structure of erotic desire is not to specify its
phenomenological content. To say what Vlastos says is not, therefore, to imply that
every Platonic lover consciously conceives of his love-object, or represents it to him-
self, as a place-holder of a value-predicate—at least, not before he has completed his
contemplative ascent to the Form of the Beautiful. Nor do the lovers whom Plato por-
trays and whose words and behavior he scrutinizes regard their beloveds as mere recep-
tacles of abstract qualities. Whatever Plato’s theory is ultimately about, it is designed
(at least in part) to explain personal relationships, to account for why certain
individuals—including the ideal couple in the Phaedrus (256a-b)—choose to spend
their entire lives together (Symp. 181d, 183e, 192b-c) and even to die for one another
(Symp. 179b-180a, 208c-d). Plato is fully alive to the sense of particularity that informs
any passionate erotic attachment between persons.132 He can afford to be precisely
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because his reductive analysis of personal erds leaves the personal element in it
unreduced.133
On Plato’s view, the lover’s conscious and articulable wish (his demande, to use
Lacan’s term) is simply not a reliable guide to his underlying motives or intentions
(his desir).134 The ‘mysterious’ character of erds (Symp. 210al) and the need for a
‘depth psychology’ in order to elucidate it derive precisely from the lack of necessary
correspondence between the content of the lover’s mental representations and the objec-
tive structure of his intentionality: even a noble lover, in Plato’s conception, may not
know what or why he loves (cf. Phdr. 255d3). Socrates, after all, did not know what
he actually desired until Diotima pointed it out to him; the very beasts, moreover,
experience an erds that has an aitia, a determinate end (namely, the immortalization
of the mortal), even though they obviously have no notion of what it is, acting as they
do without logismos (Symp. 207a-d).135 As David Glidden has persuasively argued
in the case of the Lysis, ‘Plato is not interested in how lovers of persons and things
consciously regard themselves and the objects of their desire. Plato is interested in
something else: the psychological function achieved by our loving the persons or things
we do, regardless of our various motives.’136 Plato does not allow himself to be dis-
tracted by the conscious intentions of the lover; he inquires into the objective struc-
ture of the relationship which the lover establishes with the beloved, into ‘the function
which cherished objects play for those that love them, . . . what it is among the actual
features of the loved object which coincides with the real source of satisfaction for
the lover’s condition’.137 In love as in all other realms of ethical activity, virtue is
knowledge: ‘one cannot succeed in loving another, as opposed to oneself and one’s
fantasies, unless the intent of one’s love actually designates some real object and not
one’s own state of mind. Nor is one in a position to know that he loves someone or
something unless he knows that his intent succeeds in its reference.’138 It is necessary
to receive proper guidance in matters of erotics from the time of one’s youth, as Diotima
advises (210a), in order to learn how to match what one seeks (or demands) with what
one really wants (or desires).139 Otherwise, one stands in peril of mistaking the par-
ticular individual who instantiates beauty for the beauty he instantiates; one risks,
in other words, interpreting one’s response to incarnate beauty as a longing to pos-
sess the beautiful object (i.e., as a sexual impulse) rather than as a longing to (pro)create
excellence by means of it (i.e., as an erotic desire). The species of erds we call sexual
desire is in fact a response to that share of generalized, transcendent beauty which
inheres in bodies: were such beauty not manifested in bodies, my response to it would
not be sexual·, did bodies not participate in transcendent beauty, my sexual longing
for them would not take on the passionate features of an erotic desire. I have the illu-
sion that the attraction I feel in the presence of my beloved is directed at him or her
as a person, but the strength of my passion is merely a sign that beauty is present—
inextricably mixed up, to be sure, and impossible to isolate—in the body or, could
I perceive it, in the soul or perhaps in some composite, personal feature of my
beloved.140
In pursuing the beauty in bodies we cannot afford to follow our instincts because
the danger of confusion is too great, the danger of mistaking the proximate for the
ultimate object of desire—the beautiful body for the beauty in it—and thereby failing,
as Alcibiades did, to achieve transcendence. If we wish to liberate ourselves from
the powerful grip of the phenomenal world, we must practise ‘philosophy without
fraud’ or ‘paederasty with philosophy’, Socrates maintains in the Phaedrus (249a);UI
in the Symposium Diotima makes a similarly ambitious claim for what she calls ‘cor-
rect paederasty’ (τον όρθώζ ’ιόντα επί τούτο τό πράγμα—210a; τό όρθώς
παιδεραστείν—211b; τό όρθώς έπί τα έρωτικα ΐέναι ή ύπ’ άλλου άγεσθαι—211b-c).UI It
is our misfortune that we cannot successfully pursue both our sexual and procreative
responses to beauty simultaneously: the former offers no hope of isolating the beauty
we need from the accidental circumstances of its material instantiation, whereas the
latter, in fulfilling that very hope, denies our desire the possibility of sexual gratifica-
tion. In order to perform the sexual act the (male) lover’s full attention must be absorbed
by his beloved object, by the individual, physical embodiment of beauty in all its con-
tingent specificity; his sexual desireE, if it is to be sexually expressed, must be
directed not to the beauty in the body but to the body which a buried fragment of
transcendent beauty illumines and renders sufficiently attractive to enable it to qualify
as a potential target of desire. Sex thereby condemns the lover to the tyranny of the
particular (cf. Phdo. 64d-67d, 81b-83e). I must therefore renounce the sexual gratifi-
cation of sexual desireE if I wish to fulfill the longing a beautiful body awakens in
me.143
The task of isolating beauty from its admixture in the physical world proceeds by
abstraction. But it is impossible, as we have seen, to abstract a comprehension of beauty
itself by concentrating all of one’s attention on a single instance or manifestation of
it. The process of abstraction is therefore dynamic: it demands of the mind a sort
of epistemic vibration between the particular and the universal. It requires a plurality
of objects whose common elements can be abstracted—a large data base. Abstraction
begins when I allow myself to be attracted to my beloved in a way that depersonalizes
(or, as Ludwig Chen prefers, ‘deindividualizes’)144 him, that robs him of his adorable
particulars, thereby enabling me to desire him for the beauty which he has in com-
mon with all good-looking people. Sexual desire, which is notoriously impersonal
and effectively deindividualizes its objects, provides an obvious springboard for such
a process of abstraction. But the fullest description of the movement from the specific
to the general is furnished by Diotima in the form of a grand escalated figure (to bor-
row Vlastos’ phrase): the so-called Ladder of Love.
It does not require extraordinary powers of discernment to perceive a widespread
sense of uneasiness among those commentators on Plato who discuss Diotima’s order-
ing of the steps on her ladder. Both Singer and G.M.A. Grube, for example, suggest
that something may have gone wrong when Diotima posits a seamless continuity
between our attraction to other human beings and our attraction to moral or intellec-
tual embodiments of beauty.143 As Grube puts it,
in the contemplation of supreme beauty the philosopher may indeed
find a sublime satisfaction, but we would hardly call this the satis-
faction of love which must surely be limited to relations between
individuals. If we look closer we shall find that the point where
we should part company with Plato is when Diotima reaches the
beauty of ‘laws and institutions’. Love, we feel, must have and retain
some sort of physical basis and Plato has here, though to a less
extent in the Phaedrus, been carried away on the tide of his own
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magnificent metaphors.
But Grube then reverses himself and goes on to argue, rightly, that in Plato’s view
‘the passionate love of truth in the mind is the same stream of desire which expresses
itself in physical passions’; Plato was not swept away by his own metaphors, as it turns
out, ‘for he very definitely asserts that they are not metaphors at all’; the desires for
physical satisfaction and for intellectual discovery presented themselves to Plato indistin-
guishably in his own experience of them.146 Now whether Plato himself actually did
or did not experience this unity of desire is immaterial to Grube’s point: the ascent
to beauty is not metaphorical because the various stages of the ascent are linked to
one another not by the subjective experience of the lover who progresses from one
to the next but by the objective and essential identity of the beauty that is present,
in varying degrees, in all of the objects encountered in the course of the ascent. The
discontinuity in the nature of the lover’s attraction to the objects belonging to each
of the hierarchical categories on the ladder, therefore, does not provide a reliable clue
to the unchanging attractiveness of the beauty instantiated by those objects. The objec-
tive relation of the steps to one another is grounded instead in the ontology of the
self-identical paradigm-form.147
The word ‘beautiful’, as it applies to objects in the visible world, may indeed con-
stitute an ‘incomplete predicate’ which will have a ‘different descriptive content'
depending on the subject of its predication, as Kosman argues and as Plato himself
appears to realize (Phdo. 78d-79e; Crat. 439c-440b; Resp. 474d-475a, 479a-480),14R
but beauty, insofar as it is beauty, is everywhere the same (Phdo. 78d-79e, lOOb-e;
Crat. 439c-440b; Eud. 301a-c; Resp. 476b-d, 479a-480). Not only do we call a crys-
tal, a giraffe, a mathematical proof, a naked body, a sunset, a courageous act, and
a concerto beautiful, but we do so with reference to a single form of beauty (cf. Hip.
Maj. 294a-c; Eud. 300e-30la; Gorg. 474d)—beauty not merely similar or analogous
in Newton’s Opticks and in the physique of an individual whom we may happen to
find sexually appealing but the same beauty, single and unified, pervading all value-
laden areas of human life.149 Of course, so long as we identify the beauty of a rose
with its color and the beauty of Helen with her shape, we shall quickly deduce from
the non-identity of colors and shapes that there is no one beauty that the rose and
Helen both share; but color and shape are beautiful only in the context of the particu-
lar rose and woman (cf. Phdo. 100c-d)—they are simply the media in or through which
certain individuals manifest their beauty: ‘Now this is not to deny that Helen’s being
a woman is relevant to assessing her beauty; only if x is a woman will that shape
contribute to her satisfying the definition of beauty. But this is not to say that the defi-
nition of beauty differs from kind to kind.’150
Hence, as both Singer and Julius Moravcsik maintain,151 there is neither repression
j nor sublimation in what Diotima calls ‘the correct approach to erotics’. There is no
i repression because there is no motive to restrain or deny the desire to give birth to
virtue; there is no sublimation because the authentic object of desire never changes
during the upward journey towards the Form. What changes are only the local embodi-
ments of beauty that occasion desire and the quality of the lover’s response to them.
No one would claim that the objects of intellection in themselves elicit sexual desire-
save one who was determined to defend a theory at all costs.152 Sexual desire is *
response to the stimulus of physically instantiated beauty, as we have seen: it is sexual
 187

insofar as the particular instance of beauty which arouses it is carnally embodied,

but it is erotic insofar as it is aroused by the presence of beauty, expresses itself as
an endless desire to procreate excellence therein, and ultimately aims at the lover’s
perpetual possession of the good.
The same definition of ‘erotic’ applies to the desire the lover feels at every stage
of the ascent—whether his desire continues to feel the same to him or not—even when
his response to beauty ceases altogether to be sexual (as it does at the higher reaches
of the ‘ladder’). As the proximate objects of his desire change from the utterly impure
(bodies) to the rather less impure (souls, sciences), the authentic and ultimate object
of erds (beauty) remains the same, as do both the proximate and the ultimate erotic
aims (procreation of virtue, perpetual possession of the good). The subjective character
of the lover’s erotic response may change, in other words, but it never ceases to be
erotic: when he is attracted to the beauty in one body, his response is sexual; when
he is attracted to the beauty in all bodies, it is aesthetic (or perhaps ‘erotic’ in the
current, vulgar meaning of the word); when he is attracted to the beauty in souls,
his response is personal or moral; when he is attracted to the beauty in laws and insti-
tutions, it is social or political; when he is attracted to the beauty in sciences, his
response is intellectual. All of these responses represent genuine species of erotic
desire.153 Only when I recognize that what attracts me to the person I desire is actu-
ally available to me in purer form in the objects of intellectual beauty am I finally
ready to embark upon my true course of education.
VI
Many questions about Plato’s erotic theory still remain to be answered. If the beauty
in bodies is the same beauty as the beauty in objects of intellection, according to Plato,
and if the latter manifestation of beauty is in some way superior to the former, what
is the purpose of Diotima’s ladder? Why, in other words, should I not start my erotic
education with the sciences rather than with bodies? Yet another problem presents
itself: What is the connection between erotics and aesthetics? What is the difference,
in Plato’s view, between the beauty in a beautiful body and the beauty in a successful
work of art? Why are works of art missing from the instances of beauty distributed
along Diotima’s ladder? And there are still other questions: What, for example, are
the implications of Plato’s theory for personal relations—that is, what would a properly
Platonic love-affair look like in practice? How can such a relationship be justified
both psychologically and ethically? How would it differ from what Plato’s contem-
poraries considered normal in the way of erotic relationships? Would it be more or
less exploitative of the erotic object? I believe that Plato offers answers—some more
explicit than others—to all of these questions: any serious attempt to articulate them
would require a separate study.154 Enough has already been said, however, to dissolve
the apparent paradox of Platonic eroticism and to show what sense it makes for Plato
to posit the essential unity of sensual and intellectual beauty.
Commentators and scholars have traditionally assumed that Platonic erds cannot
refer with equal validity to both sexual and philosophical activity; they have tended,
accordingly, to treat one version of erds as primary to Plato’s philosophical intent
and to view the other as a logical or figural corollary to it. Those who privilege the
metaphysical function of desire in Plato’s system regard his eloquent appeal to the
 data of sexual experience as a racy metaphor, model, or analogy for the erotics of
philosophical inquiry.155 Those who consider sexuality a basic and irreducible ele-
ment in human life treat philosophical erds as a redirected, sublimated form of sexual
energy. Neither approach does justice, I believe, to the psychological and philosophi-
cal power of Plato’s erotic theory. I have tried to demonstrate that a coherent account
can be given of Platonic eroticism without collapsing either its sexual or its metaphysical
dimension to the other.
Plato’s argument that the lover’s sexual desire is identical with respect to the nature
of desire to the philosopher’s desire for being and truth ( Resp. 485a-b, 490a-b, 501d)
rests on three assumptions: (1) sexual desireE is aroused by the beauty of or in an
individual human body; (2) beauty is transcendent; (3) beauty is qualitatively
transcategorical—that is, the beauty manifested in all and each of the manifestations
of transcendent beauty is identical with respect to beauty. The argument, to be sure,
requires many more assumptions about the nature of sexual desire, such as that it is
intentional, that it is creative rather than acquisitive, and that the Form whose manifesta-
tion in bodies evokes it is itself beautiful.156 But the distinctive orientation of the Pla-
tonic theory results from its being firmly based, as both Singer and Vlastos have
observed,157 on a metaphysical ‘re-structuring of what there is on the scaffolding of
what is more and less real’.158 The beauty in the body is the same beauty, qua beauty,
as the beauty of the Form, and it is the Form of Beauty which ‘causes’159 the body
to be beautiful. The sexual longing excited by a beautiful body is therefore a transcen-
dental desire: it intends, unbeknownst perhaps to the lover who experiences it, an
object of metaphysical knowledge.
It is not through some philosophical sleight of hand or flight of the metaphorical
imagination, then, that Plato identifies the intellectual’s quest for truth with the lover’s
awestruck admiration for his beloved’s physical beauty: both responses express the
same desire (erds), are aroused by the same object (transcendent beauty), and have
the same aim (the achievement of eudaimonia, defined as the lover’s perpetual pos-
session of the good).160 Hence, there is no need to substitute for erds or ‘desire’ some
other—more neutral—term, such as ‘aspiration’,161 in order to express the intentional
and psychological unity of Platonic eroticism: it will be sufficient simply to credit
the ideal or transcendental dimensions of all forms of erotic desire. Sexual activity,
for the erotic man at least, represents a low-order form of philosophical activity: every
passionate longing for the physical beauty of a human individual is an expression of
a more profound, if inchoate, metaphysical desire to transcend the conditions of mor-
tality and make the good one’s own forever. Just as M. Jourdain was delighted to learn
that all his life he had been speaking prose without realizing it, so we are entitled
to take whatever pleasure there may be in the reflection that we have all been engaged
in pursuing metaphysical truth without knowing it162—at least to the extent that we
have all discovered in the experience of sexuality a poignant reminder of our mortal
finitude and limitations.
* * * * *

Not all undergraduates find the erotic doctrines of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus
so enigmatic as I once did: Oliver Alden, for example, the title character of George
Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan (1935), certainly knew what to make of them. From
 189

his privileged vantage in Emerson’s old rooms in Divinity Hall at Harvard College,
during the first decade of this century, Oliver took Plato to task in a prize essay in
philosophy composed for Professor Santayana, who had solicited his students’ per-
sonal comments. ‘Plato’, he wrote, ‘may have been a great philosopher, but he knew
nothing about love. He talks only about desire.’ By the end of the novel, however,
Oliver has come to see Plato’s emphasis in a more positive light. Plato’s relative neglect
of ‘general benevolence, friendliness, and charity’ turns out to be an advantage of the
theory instead of a liability:
Now affection and kindness are all that I have felt or ever ought
to feel about the real Rose, or about the real Edith; just as it was
all I could rightly feel about the real Jim or the real Mario: but
where I have . . . allowed them to bewitch me or to make me suf-
fer, then I was not seeing the reality in them at all, but only an
image, only a mirage, of my own aspiration. They may drop out,
they may change, they may prove to be the sad opposite of what
I thought them: but my image of them in being detached from their
accidental persons, will be clarified in itself, will become truer to
my profound desire. . . . Towards them, towards my wife and chil-
dren, if I ever have them, natural affection, tenderness, sympathy;
but no expectation that they can ever fill my whole being, or make
163
my true happiness, or entrance my soul. ...
Oliver’s reasoning breaks down, to my mind, only when he goes on to insist that ‘the
inspiration of a profound desire, fixed upon some lovely image, is what is called love,’
and when he attempts to defend Plato on that basis.
Singer and Vlastos, by contrast, are right to criticize Plato for having failed to pro-
duce a fully adequate philosophy of love.164 Platonic eros is indeed inadequate to the
task of explicating the nature of love, and Plato never intended to put it to that use.
What Plato did attempt, and what he triumphantly achieved, was the creation of an
erotic theory that could account for the metaphysics of desire. The various defects
which Singer and Vlastos rightly see in the Platonic eros when it is construed as love—
its impersonality, its fixation on qualities, its constant reference to the interests of the
lover rather than the beloved—disappear as soon as eros is conceived as desire. I should
like to believe that Plato, if confronted by his recent critics, would not have resorted
to the rather forced defensive strategies employed by Donald Levy and A.W. Price,165
for example, but would have willingly appropriated, instead, the apology devised by
one of his more prominent modem disciples.166 the poet Shelley:
I can give not what men call love.
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star.
Of the night for the morrow.
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

iyu

NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented at an N.E.H. Summer Seminar on ‘The Philosophy of
Socrates', conducted by Professor Gregory Vlastos at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983.1 wish
to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting my research. I also wish to thank Professor
Vlastos and the members of the Seminar for many valuable suggestions as well as much friendly help and
advice. Revised versions of this paper were subsequently presented at Brigham Young University, Duke Univer-
sity, the University of Maine at Farmington, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the (North
Carolina) Triangle Ethics Circle, resulting in substantial improvements. Final revisions were supported by
a Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from the National Humanities Center, which
provided the best imaginable environment for completing the work. I owe a special debt of gratitude to John
Bussanich. Cynthia A. Freeland, Eric A. Havelock, Richard Patterson, Ronald M. Polansky, Irving Singer,
Nicholas D. Smith. Gregory Vlastos (especially these last two), and this journal's two anonymous referees,
all of whom read and criticized revised drafts of the seminar paper; I have also benefited from discussing
aspects of this essay with Norman Austin, George Bealer, Alan D. Code, David N. Dobrin, Martin P. Gold-
ing, Henry Levinson, Mark L. McPherran, Glenn W. Most, Martha Nussbaum, David Reeve, H.A.T.O.
Reiche, Friedrich Solmsen, Kenneth F. Sparks, Kenneth W. Wachter, Jerry Wakefield, and John J. Winkler.
Many persons, then, have greatly aided my thinking, but none should for that reason be presumed to agree
with the results.
1
Rouse 1956, 95-96.
2
Dover 1974, 211; Sutton 1981, 186-189. 224-225; Foucault 1984, 177-183, 222-223.
3
See. generally. Redfield 1982, esp. 192-198, on the importance of χάρις (charts) in marriage; on the
traditional separation of ends and γάμος (games) in Greek culture, see Winkler 1982; Foucault 1984, 159-203;
and cf. Goessler 1962. 29-69. For the modern Greek analogue, see Hirschon 1978, 75-76.
4
Dover 1974, 212, citing a number of corroborating sources from the classical period, of which the
most pertinent are Aristophanes, Lys. 870-871. 905-906; Demosthenes, lix 64.
5
Vlastos 1981, 4n; cf. Erbse 1966, 201-202. The wording of Plato's Phaedrus (ΰπερεβάλετο τή φιλία
διά τόν έρωτα: Symp. I79cl-2) is recapitulated by Aristotle in his own formulation of the relation between
eras and phi ha: έράν . . . υπερβολή γάρ τις είναι βούλεται φιλίας, τούτο δέ πρός ένα (ΕΝ ix 1171al2). On erotic
hyperbole, see, generally. Foucault 1984, 59-60.
6
On this passage, see Grube 1935. 118-119; Vlastos 1981, 22n.
7
Note that Aristotle treats the marriage-bond as a species of philia: EN viii 1162al6-33; also, 1158bll-16,
!161a22-25; EE vii !242a32-33; cf. Prior An. 68a39-68b6. See, also, Plutarch, Mor. 769a-b.
* The emphasis in this passage of the Symposium (200a-e) on gratification as an aim of eros requires
the collocation of eros with epithvmia. for Plato does not regard eros chiefly as a drive to physical enjoyment
and tends to speak of the exclusively carnal component in eros as epithymia. In 200a-e, however, Socrates
has been obliged to adopt the outlook of his interlocutor in order to refute it, and Agathon (like the youthful
Socrates in this respect) assumes that eros is a desire for the beautiful—that is, for the possession of a sexu-
ally gratifying object—contrary to the Platonic view articulated by Diotima at 206e (and discussed in sec-
tion 4, below). Hence, Socrates conjoins epithymia with eros in his refutation of Agathon; a similar emphasis
occurs in Tim. 91c-d.
’ E.g., Demos 1934, 341; ‘It can not be too strongly stressed that there is no Platonic love in Platonic
love'\ Dodds 1951, 218; Vlastos 1981, 25; Cummings 1976, esp. 23: ‘the only thing clear about eros and
philia in Plato is that love in Plato is not Platonic love. . . . ’ Dover 1966, 48-50, and Lowenstam 1985,
88, also argue against the identification of Platonic eros with love.
10
Gould 1963, 1.
" Gould 1963, 37.
12
Gould 1963, 1-3.
13
Singer 1966, 49-90; Vlastos 1981, 3-42. Attempted refutations include; Clay 1975, 119-127; Kosman
1976; Levy 1979; Nussbaum 1979; Haden 1979/80, 382-387; Glidden 1981; Price 1981. Adiitimnil nipfmrt
fill lln li110 ITT Ifrimiin lff"frTir~j"ΊΤΤΤ Mini! mm P*"ΪTillIIIII Γ ' Τ " " ΐ * " Τ 4,1,1 ■“““ * '
Additional support for the views of Singer and Vlastos has been furnished—unknowingly, it would
seem—by Warner 1979. Now Scruton 1986, 1, has imputed to Plato a disastrous (in his eyes) ‘distinction
between erotic love and sexual desire’; Scruton makes the same distinction, however, though not so exclu-
sive a one as that he ascribes to Plato. Plato’s erotic theory, on my interpretation, is considerably closer
 191

to Scruton's account of 'sexual desire’ than the latter appears to have realized.
14
For a lively rebuttal of the first tendency, see Singer 1966, 49ff.
15
Vlastos 1981, 3-6, esp. 4n.; Dover 1974. 212; Dover 1978, 49-50; Dover 1980, 1-2. See. also. Else
1981. Cope 1877, 292-296, is still a helpful guide to the usage of «οργή, Ερως, φίλην, and αγαπάν in fifth-
and fourth-century authors; more recently, Fischer 1973. The correspondences between philia and 'love'
are probably closer in Elizabethan than in modem English, as Scruton 1986, 219. observes.
14
Vlastos 1981, 11-19; Kraut 1973, esp. 336-337; and cf. Aristotle's critique in Pol. ii 1262bl-25. On
the suppression of eras in the Republic, see Rosen 1965.
17
See Vlastos 1981, 6-11; Versenyi 1975, esp. 187, on the meaning of philia. On Plato's manipulation
of traditional notions of philia in the Lysis, see Hoerber 1959, esp. 22; Glidden 1980; Glidden 1981.
14
Cf. Kosman 1976, 53-54.
19
Vlastos 1981, 4n.
20
Dover 1980, 1. The notorious exception to all this, of course, is a passage from the (lost) Erechtheus
of Euripides, fr. 358 (Nauck):
oux ε«ι μητρός ούδέν ήδιον τέκυοις·
έράτε μητρός, παϊόις, ώς ούχ ε«’ έρως
τοιοΰτος άλλος οστις ήδίων εράν.
As Dover 1978, 156n8, observes, this passage is deliberately daring in language, but [it) is so obviously
not a command to feel incestuous desire for one's mother that there is no risk of misunderstanding’.
21
Dover 1973, esp. 59; cf. Dover 1974. 69-70, on the conventional application of kalos to the body
rather than the soul of an individual. See also Barrett 1964, 239 ad Euripides, Hipp. 441-442: here above
all the translation "love’’ is misleading: the word [erosi] denotes simply desire, with no thought of wishing
the beloved well, so that there is no suggestion (which "love” would give) of consulting another’s interest
at the expense of one’s own’; generally, Devereux 1968, esp. 74-75.
22
Searle 1983, 1. Scruton 1986, 8, defines intentionality as the quality of "reference beyond” which
is contained in human consciousness: the quality of pointing to, and delineating, an object of thought’ and
he makes intentionality the central feature in his account of sexual desire (pp. 18ff.). Cf. also Nagel 1979.
41-42, on the intentionality of sexual desire.
23
An extreme instance: a character in Edward Albee’s play. The Death of Bessie Smith, announces
to his beloved, 'at night the sheets of my bed are like a tent, poled center-upward in my love for you.’ Cf.
Quintilian, Inst, viii 6.24: ut . . . “Venerem" quam "coitum " dixisse magis decet. For an example from
Platonic scholarship, see note 77, below.
24
Proust 1954, vol. i. 763.
23
Singer 1966, 87.
26
On the ability of eras to generate philia, see Vlastos 1981, 4n; Dover 1973. 59: Dover 1978, 41. 46-47.
50-52; Dover 1980. 1-2.
27
Kosman 1976, 65.
24
According to the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws (838a-b), most people never even experience
any desire for sex (Επιθυμία ταότης τής συνουβίας) with good-looking persons when those persons happen
to be members of the immediate family (but see Resp. 571c-d).
29
Hackforth 1952, 29-30.
30
Some contemporary approximations to Plato’s outlook are discussed by Ferguson 1959, 93-94; Ehlers
1966, esp. 20-25, 65-90. See also Kraus 1983, esp. 13-14, and compare Democritus, DK 68 B73; Euripides,
ftT. 388, 547, 672. 773.45-46, 897 (Nauck). On Euripides, see North 1966. with the qualification by Vlastos
1981. 22n63.
31
Dover 1978, 43; cf. MacCary 1982. 144.
32
Eros continues to be used, of course, to denote any passionate desire, regardless of its object: see,
e.g., Archilochus, fr. 19.3 (West), and compare Herodotus, v 32 and Euripides. Rh. 166; Sappho, fr. 16.4
(L-P); Aeschylus, Ag. 540, Eum. 865; Sophocles, fr. 85.8 (Nauck); Critias, DK 85 B15 = Euripides, fr.
659 (Nauck); Euripides, Pho. 359 and fr. 729.2 (Nauck); Gorgias, Pal. 15 (DK 82 Blla); Thucydides, vi 24.3.
33
E.g., Xenophon, Hiero 1.30. See the brilliant discussion of this point by Foucault 1984, esp. 60-62,
115-116; also, Dover 1974, 69-70, 208-209, 212. Cf. Freud's definition of ‘libido’ by analogy with hunger'
in the opening paragraphs of Freud 1905, 135; also, 149. See Sulloway 1979, 277n (for the pre-Freudian
history of the term ‘libido) and 291ff. (for the pre-Freudian association of sex with hunger).
34
Schreckenberg 1964, 50-65; Barrett 1964, 394, ad Euripides, Hipp. 1277-1280; Dover 1978, 60-62;
Golden 1984, 314nn27, 28. Cf. Foucault 1984, 115-116.
35
Simonides, fr. 37.29-30 (PMG 542, p. 282); cf. Pindar, fr. 122.9; Sophocles. Ant. 787-788, Trach.
443, frr. 235, 855.13-16 (Nauck); Euripides, fr. 431 (Nauck); PI., Symp. 196dl; Theocritus, 30.30-31. See
Dover 1974. 76. for references to the topos ‘Even Zeus was worsted by Eros’; also, Mitscherling 1985.
36
Agathon, fr. 29 (Nauck); cf. Philostratus. Epist. 52; Plutarch, Mor. 764c-d and Mor., fr. 138 (Sand-
bach. who provides these references); generally, Gorgias, Hel. 16-19 (DK 82 Bll). For passages illustrating
the visual character of the erotic stimulus, see (e.g.) Hymn. Horn. 5.56-57, 81-91; Mimnermus, fr. 5.2 (West);
Theocritus. 2.77, 82. For the tradition that located the source of ends in the eyes (of the beloved, usually)
and that made eye-contact between lover and beloved the erotic stimulus par excellence, see the long list
of passages assembled by Pearson 1909. to which add Hesiod. Th. 910-911; ps.-Hesiod, Sc. 7-8; Aleman,
fr. 3.61-62 (PMG 3. p. 12); Ibycus. fr. 6 (PMG 287. p. 150); Sophocles, Trach. 107; Euripides, Hipp. 525-526;
Gorgias. Hel. 19 (DK 82 Bll); Aristotle, fr. 96 (Rose); Maximus of Tyre. 25.2; Athenaeus, xiii 564b-f;
and a fragmentary poem ascribed to Aspasia by Herodicus of Babylon and quoted by Masurius ap. Athenaeus,
v 219e.
Cf. Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologica pt. 1, q. 5, art. 4: ‘Beauty is what pleases on being seen.’
37
For a conspectus of sources, see Bonanno 1973; Giacomelli 1980 (and cf. Fortenbaugh 1966); gener-
ally. Dover 1978, 58, 87-88. Cf. also Stigers 1981, 46-49.
3i
Dover 1978. 58. cites Theognis, 949-950 = 1278cd, inverted by Cydias, fr. 1 ( PMG 714, p. 370) =
Plato, Chrm. 155d. The new Archilochus fragment also likens the object of sexual aggression to a fawn
(PC. 7511.31 = SLG S478.47); one might compare Anacreon, fr. 63 (PMG 408, p. 203); Horace, Carm.
i 23. The entire tradition is parodied by Theocritus, 13.62-65. On lovers as hunters in Plato, see Prot. 309a;
Symp. 203d5. Soph. 222d-e. Laws 823b. See. generally. Parry 1964. esp. 269-272; Hoffmann 1977; Detienne
1979. 23-52; Borgeaud 1979. 53-55; Schnapp 1984; Zeitlin 1986.
39
For a similar interpretation of the animal-similes in Homer, see Redfield 1975, 191-199.
40
Cf. Theognis. 1353-1356; Freud 1905. 150-151. on ‘overvaluation'.
41
MacCary 1982. 105.
43
'Jai bien besoin d’avoir cette femme, pour me sauver du ridicule den étre amoureux: car oil ne méne
pas un désir contrarié?' (Lettre 4).
43
Cf. Aristophanes. Eccl. 956-959. 966-968 (cited by Dover 1974, 211); Theognis, 1319-1322; Aeschy-
lus. PV 654; Theocritus, 29.40. 30.23.
44
Dover 1974. 212-213.
45
See Foucault 1984 , 64-66; Dover 1974. 213n. Cf. Cercidas, fr. 5 (Powell).
46
See Krenkel 1979. 164-65.
47
The issue is disputed: see. generally. Bailey 1947. 1303-1304.
4
* On the meaning of these words, see the gloss by Bailey 1947. 1304.
49
Cf. Tim. 86d. 90e-91d. for the closest Platonic parallel to the Lucretian passage, and note that Lucretius,
in his attack on amor (1058-1120). comes closer than any other ancient writer to duplicating Plato's outlook
in the Symposium: Lucretius, however, draws the opposite conclusion from the same evidence: he condemns
desire and praises appetite. On ems as a νόσος or νόσημα, see Sophocles, Trach. 445, fr. 153.1 (Nauck);
Gorgias, Hel. 19 (DK 82 Bll); Theocritus. 2.95: Barrett 1964, 246-247, ad Euripides, Hipp. 476-477; Las-
serre 1944, 175. 177; Lebeck 1972, esp. 276n: Dover 1974, 125.
50
On the question of the authorship of the speech, see the sensible remarks of de Vries 1969, 11-14.
On the unconventionality of the sentiment expressed in it, cf. the Dissoi Logoi 2.2 (DK 90).
51
See Nussbaum 1982. esp. 94-%. Rara fuller account of Plato's attitude to ‘slavish virtue’, see, generally,
Irwin 1977, 160-162. ¡72-174 . 238-241. and cf. Foucault 1984, 63-73. 253-254.
52
Pieper 1964. 17.
53
Pace Pieper 1964. 12. who claims that ems is love, not desire, and that Lysias' speech ‘proposes
as a normative standard desire and enjoyment without love".
54
Note that eras in Plato generally implies epithymia, in the sense that ems is a species of desire, but
epithymia obviously does not imply ems: cf. Hyland 1968, esp. 36. Prodicus, DK 84 B7, calls ems ‘epithymia
doubled': Dover 1973, 59.
55
See the excellent discussion by Gould 1963. 113-116.
** I do not of course mean to imply that erds on Plato's view is unnatuml, merely that it is not to
be understood primarily as a biophysical mechanism—which seems to be something like the way that Plato’s
Eryximachus understands it. Note that Aristophanes is a good candidate to refute Eryximachus, since if
 193

the latter’s view is correct ems is an absurd, grotesque bodily function, the sort of thing that furnishes the
comic poet with a traditional source of humor on the stage and that his hiccups in Plato’s Symposium neatly
exemplify: the hiccups represent a typically Aristophanic comic reduction of the biophysical interpretation
of ems—eros is turned into a mere physical spasm, a penile sneeze (see, esp., Symp. 189a).
57
See Verdenius 1962; generally, Gundert 1949; and cf. Simmel 1921, 241.
5
* Tt των καλών έ<τttv 6 Έρως . . . ; έρφ ά έρών των κολών' τί ίρφ; (Symp. 204d; cf. 204e, 207a); τί
ποτέ βούλοιτ’ άν αύτώ γενέσθαι τόν τρίτον [i.e., μικτόν] έρωτά τις ϊχων τοοτον; (Laws 837b). That Aristophanes’
myth is indeed addressed specifically to the question of the erotic aim is evident from Diotima’s rebuttal
of one point in it at the conclusion of her own disquisition on the aim of erds (205d-e; cf. 212c). On the
importance of distinguishing the object from the aim of ems. see section 4, below, esp. note 102.
19 For this felicitous translation of symbola (191d) I am indebted to Markus 1955, 135.

40
Cf. Diotima’s description of the paederastic lover’s aim at 211d: μήτ’ ίοθίειν μήτε πίνειν, άλλά θεασθαι
μόνον καί αυνείναι.
61
Cf. Freud 1912, 190: ‘For what motive would men have for putting sexual instinctual forces to other
uses if, by any distribution of those forces, they could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? They would never
abandon that pleasure and they would never make any further progress.’
62
Cf. Brisson 1973, 36-37.
63
Nussbaum 1979, 140-141: ‘The objects of these creatures’ passions arc whole people: not ‘‘com-
plexes of desirable qualities,” but entire beings, thoroughly embodied, with all their idiosyncracies, flaws,
and even faults. . . . Nor are love objects interchangeable for these people, as seats of abstract goodness
or beauty might be. The individual is loved not only as a whole, but also as a unique and irreplaceable whole.’
44
Cf. Singer 1966, 53-54 (I have substituted ‘desire’ for ‘love’ in his formulation): ‘Among our spheri-
cal ancestors desire did not exist. It came into being only after they were cut in two. . . . Desire is the
yearning for one’s other half . . . and this occurs before Zeus moves the reproductive organs around to
make sexual intercourse possible. For Aristophanes, as for Plato, sex is a physical makeshift. It is needed
for procreation in our divided state; it may provide a rudimentary union with another person; but in itself
it does not explain the nature of desire. Far from being sexual, desire is the search for that state of wholeness
in which sex did not exist. ’ For the corresponding psychoanalytic distinction between ego-libido and object-
libido, see Freud 1914 (the original formulation). Cf. also Jaeger 1947, 184-185; Levi 1949, 295-2%; Bris-
son 1973; Kosman 1976, 66; Nussbaum 1979, 144: 'Eros is the desire to be a being without any contingent
occurrent desires. It is a second-order desire that all desires should be cancelled.'
65
Singer 1966, 68-69; Lowenstam 1985, 89; cf. Brisson 1973, 42.
66
Cf. Freud 1912, 188-189: ‘It is my belief that, however strange it may sound, we must reckon with
the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of
complete satisfaction. . . . [A]s a result of the diphasic onset of object-choice, and the interposition of the
barrier against incest, the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only
a surrogate for it. Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been
lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none
of which, however, brings full satisfaction. This may explain the inconstancy in object-choice, the “craving
for stimulation” which is so often a feature of the love of adults.’ Sartre and Lacan similarly rule out the
possibility of successful sexual desire, though on (different versions of) Hegelian grounds: see Wilden 1%8.
Scruton 1986, 120-130, like Rollo May before him, argues that sexual intercourse is not the aim of sexual
desire; he also makes a number of interesting observations about the ‘paradoxicality’ of desire.
67
Cf. Scruton 1986, 194.1 disagree, therefore, with Dover 1966. 47-48, who argues that Aristophanes'
myth is entirely at odds with Diotima s erotic doctrine.
6
* On the self-transcending character of the desire for what one lacks, cf. Gadamer 1980, 14-15.
69
This is precisely the same distinction that has recently been championed by Scruton 1986 in sup-
posed opposition to Plato.
70
See, generally, Greenberg and Mitchell 1983; cf. also Wilden 1968, 168-174.
71
Demos 1934; Jaeger 1947, 188; Kranz 1958, 74-80; Gould 1%3, 44-45; Friedlander 1969, i 41-44.
72
Erbse 1966, 201, gets it exactly wrong when he insists: ‘ Platon geht augenscheinlich von dem Grund-
gedanken aus, dass sich die reine Begeisterung for das Schdne, Gute und Wzhre nur mil Hilfe der kdrper-
lichen Begierde bilden kdnnen, also unter Mitwirkung desjenigen WirUwgens, das wir als irdische oder sinnliche
Liebe zu bezeichnen pflegen. ’ For Plato it is not sexuality that gives a boost to erotic desire, but rather erotic
desire that endows sexuality with its soul-shaking power.
 73
Cf. Neumann 1965, 54. For a detailed outline of Plato’s argument about the nature of thirst, see
Robinson 1971. Later echoes of Plato’s view of the appetites may conceivably be found in Sextus Empiricus,
Pyrr. Hyp. i 11.24, i 34.238. Though I treat Plato's analysis of epithymia as an analysis of appetite, I do
not wish to obscure the many differences between ‘appetite’ (i.e., epithymia) in Plato’s conception and what
I described in sections 1 and 2 of this essay as the notion of ‘appetite’ or ‘natural compulsion’ (άναγχή)
shared by many classical Greeks. As 1 hope will become clear, Plato’s conceptualization of epithymia, though
related to the common Greek notion, does not accurately express or represent it but, if anything, caricatures
it somewhat.
74
Cf. Irwin 1977, 192-193. Cf. also Watson 1975, esp. 208-215, whose distinction between ‘desiring’
and ‘valuing’ turns on the distinction between good-independent and good-dependent desires and so is roughly
congruent with the distinction between desire A and desireE which 1 have ascribed to Plato; Watson fails to
differentiate Platonic epithymia from eros in terms of ‘desiring’ and ‘valuing’, however—partly because his
interpretation of Plato is influenced by Penner 1971 and partly because he quite rightly observes that not
all good-independent desires are appetites. According to Gadamer 1980, 17-18, the difference between appe-
tite and desire for Plato depends on the distinction between conditional and unconditional valuation. Plato’s
conceptualization of epithymia may be compared, with interesting results, to Bertrand Russell’s conceptu-
alization of desire’ in the third chapter of Russell 1921, 58-7β, esp. 67-68; cf. also Bishop Butler, Sermon 2.10-13.
7!
See Irwin 1977, 193; cf. also 230-232; 337n53.
76
I borrow this analogy from Penner 1971, 117n, although I do not accept his interpretation of epithymia
as a thought-independent desire; see note 86, below.
77
I hope to discuss Plato's shifting terminology in a forthcoming essay on ‘Plato and the Language
of Desire'. Gosling 1973, 18, takes Resp. 439d6 to mean that Plato includes ‘love’ (!) in the epithymetic
part of the soul.
78
It is precisely the failure to distinguish between the epithymetic and the erotic manifestations of sex-
ual desire in Plato's thought that leads to the massive misinterpretation of Plato’s erotic theory by' Scruton
1986, who identifies Platonic epithymia with the whole of sexual desire and who therefore reproaches Plato
for teaching that all sexual desire (as opposed to ’erotic love’) is a bestial affair.
79
Cf. Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologica pt. i, q. 5, art. 6: ‘that which terminates the movement
of appetite in the form of rest in the thing desired is called the pleasant’. For the opposing tradition, which
teaches that appetites do not aim at their own satisfaction but rather at the ‘external things themselves’—i.e.,
at the objects that will serve to gratify them, see Bishop Butler, Sermon 11.6-16; Thomas Hill Green,
Prolegomena to Ethics, ii 2, §§ 121-128; iii 1, § 158-170: Campbell 1967, 123-127.
80
Cf. Xenophon,, Mem. i 2.29-31. where Socrates, using identical language, rebukes Critias for his
relentless pursuit of the beautiful Euthydemus by comparing him to a pig scratching itself against rocks.
Cf. also Hythlodaeus' remark about sexual pleasure in Thomas More’s Utopia (quoted by Greenblatt 1980,
43): ‘If a person thinks that his felicity consists in this kind of pleasure, he must admit that he will be in
the greatest happiness if his lot happens to be a life which is spent in perpetual hunger, thirst, itching, eat-
ing, drinking, scratching, and rubbing.'
81
See Foucault 1984 , 51-53, esp. 53n.
82
See Irwin 1979, ad Plato, Gorg. 491d4, 491e, 493a, 499e-500a, and 505b-c, on the various indica-
tions telling both for and against the interpretation of epithymia as a good-independent desire in the Gorgias.
See, generally, Dodds 1945, largely recapitulated in Dodds 1951, 207-235.
83
Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948. 660.
84
To be sure, an ethical hedonist might find a specifically positive value in anything that constitutes
for him a source of pleasure, but such a possibility does not threaten Plato’s conceptual distinction between
epithymia and eros in terms of he done-directed versus value-directed desire: it just so happens that in the
case of the ethical hedonist the agent aims at pleasure qua good and thereby places a positive (ideological)
value on gratification over and above the actual gratification afforded by the object; thus, the hedonist trans-
forms what for most people are objects of appetite into objects of erotic desire as well. Cf. Green, Prolegomena
to Ethics, iii 1, § 158.
85
This seems to be the logic behind Plato’s aigument for calling the appetitive part of the soul φιλοχρήματσν
as well as έπιθυμητιχόν and for collapsing the distinction between those two dimensions of appetite at Resp.
580e-581a (an aigument which Irwin 1977, 337n53, considers ‘feeble’, noting that Plato ‘does not always
do justice to his own discussion’): the love of money is taken to be a purely instrumental desire (διά χρημά-
των μάλιστα άποτελοϋνται αί τοιαΰται έπιθυμίαι); cf. Moline 1978, 9-10. But whenever someone pursues
 1^0

■¿pTpavAyjx; not simply because it is a means to the gratification of his desires but because commerce represents
to him a meaningful way of living his life, then, as Diotima maintains, his activity qualifies as erotic—or,
to use her equivalent expression, as an emOupwt ttov dya0<iv xai tou tuSatpovuv (Symp. 205d)—inasmuch
as the valuation he places upon it is mediated by his notion of what is good. See the excellent discussion
of this point (to which I shall return in section 4, below, at note 118) by Sinaiko 1965, 83-86; cf. also Irwin
1977, 167, 173-174, 235-241.
Note that nothing prevents an appetitive object from having the same extension as an erotic object: in
the case of money, just cited, there is no extensional difference between the actual objects of desire in Resp.
580e-581a and Symp. 205d, only a difference in the descriptions or aspects under which they are desired;
cf. Watson 1975, 211. I may desircA this glass of wine because I believe it will satisfy my thirst or I may
desireE the same glass of wine because I believe the wine in the glass used to be my grandmother’s favor-
ite kind of wine; similarly, I may desire A my beloved for the sake of the pleasure which sexual intercourse
with him or her affords me or I may desire E the same individual because he or she is youthful, French,
kind, very much like my ex-lover, a friend of Marlon Brando's, and so on. (On this point, see Proust 1954,
vol. ii, 362.) Indeed, I may even desire the same human individual appetitively and erotically at the same
time, but (if so) that is a fact about my own psychology, not about the definition or the nature of appetitive
and erotic desire.
84
It may be objected, however, that some appetitive desires are indeed content-specific. Suppose, for
example, that I want to have some Chinese food for supper tonight and that, moreover, I particularly want
to eat a certain kind of dish made with beef and bitter melon which I especially prize. Suppose, further,
that I desire this food not because some value or other attaches to it in my eyes—not because, say, it reminds
me of a particularly happy period in my life during which I tasted that dish for the first time—but because
I happen to be in the mood for it. If I am unable to obtain this particular food and have to make do with
a hamburger instead I will not be devastated, of course, but I will be distinctly disappointed, even though
a hamburger will serve to satisfy my hunger quite adequately. Is my desire still an appetitive desire, accord-
ing to the criteria I have outlined above and imputed to Plato? Yes, because what remains foremost in my
intention is the desire for a certain kind of ‘pleasure’ (that is, for the gratification of a particular need),
not the desire for an individual object—and the impulse to obtain hedone, as we have seen, is the signature
of epithymetic intentionality. It so happens, in other words, that I have become psychologically dependent
upon the regular procurement of a pleasure which only a certain type of object affords me, but I do not
value the object itself except in an instrumental sense. Note, also, that what I desire is not one particular
serving of the dish in question rather than another: any old sample of beef with bitter melon—so long as
it is properly prepared, of course, which signifies only that it satisfies the condition of being gratifying-
will do. Nonetheless^ this objection to Plato’s account of appetite has sufficient force to demonstrate that
appetitive objects, though content-generic, need not be conceived as empty of all content whatsoever; they
may in certain cases have considerable specificity: they just lack sufficient specificity to individuate them
completely.
It will be observed that my interpretation of eras and epithymia in Plato lies athwart the distinction between
thought-dependent and thought-independent desires which Penner 1971 borrows from Hampshire and applies
to Plato. According to Penner, if I understand him correctly, epithymia is thought-independent, but the desire
for the consumption of a particular object involves the exercise of practical reason (e.g., this liquid is water;
drinking it, rather than looking at it, will satisfy my thirst, etc.) and is therefore thought-dependent. Irwin
(1977, 328nl8, paragraph 6) has discussed some of the defects of Penner’s approach; for my purposes, it
is sufficient to remark that Penner’s analysis does not enable us to determine whether the individual object
of a desire is appetitive or erotic, since from his perspective every desire for a particular object is
thought-dependent.
87
Cf. the treatment of ‘individualising thought' by Scruton 1986, 78-82. who considers Plato, however,
an adversary of the view he expounds (34-35).
88
Friedlander 1969, i 50-53, calls this feature of Platonic eras its ‘intentionality’: every erotic relation-
ship includes, in addition to the T and ‘thou’ of the two lovers, an ‘object’ or ‘Idea’ towards which they
move. I borrow the term ‘triangulation’ from Girard 1965.
89
Freud 1905, 161-162. Cf. Vlastos 1981, 28-30, for a discussion of correspondences between the Pla-
tonic and Romantic tendencies to idealize erotic objects. On ‘the complicity’ between psychoanalysis and
philosophical idealism (as typified by Plato), see Brenkman 1982; cf. Livet 1976.
90
Proust 1954, vol. i, 833. ‘There is no such thing as a romantic experience’, Oscar Wilde wrote in
196

1885: ‘there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. Our most fiery moments
of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel.
So at least it seems to me.’ (Hart-Davis 1979, 64.)
91 Cf. Moravcsik 1971, esp. 291.

92 See Proust 1954, vol. i, 100: 'Meme les femmes qui pretendent ne juger un homme que sur son phy-

sique, voient en ce physique I emanation d une vie spiciale': also, vol. ii. 46, 362.
93 For some of the difficulties, see Pascal, Pensees 323 (Brunschvicg = 688 Lafuma); Kosman 1976,

56-57; Scruton 1986. 98. 111-118. Cf. Simmel 1921. 244: ‘The deepest mystery of our world view, however.
Individuality—this unanalyzable unity, which is not to be derived from anything else, not subsumable under
any higher concept, set within a world infinitely analyzable, calculable, and governed by general laws—this
individuality stands for us as the actual focal point of love, which for this very reason becomes entwined
in the darkest problematic aspects of our concept of the world in contrast with the rational clarity of the
Platonic attitude’.
94 The terms ‘sample’, ‘instance’, and ‘manifestation’, as they appear in my text, are simply working

terms. I must caution the reader not to understand them in one or another of the ways in which they have
been defined by recent philosophers of language. Thus, I do not mean by ‘sample’ the same thing as does
Goodman 1976, 52ff., who uses ‘sample’ interchangeably with ‘example’ and ‘exemplification’; my distinc-
tion between ‘sample’ and ‘manifestation’ cuts across his categories: a glass of water is a sample of water,
as 1 see it, but a youthful person—one who manifests youthfulness—is both an example of youthfulness and
an exemplification of the predicate ‘youthful’ as well as an instance of youthfulness.
93 See Quine 1960, 97-99. But see, also, Bealer 1979, esp. 282-283, who argues against the identifica-

tion of ‘stuffs’ with ‘scattered particulars’.

96 For Plato’s implicit observation of the distinction between erotic phenomenology and erotic inten-

tionality, see section 5, below, at note 131.

97 Puce Nagel 1979, 42-43, who, despite his own warnings against the temptation to adopt a ‘pious

view’ of the ‘psychological content’ of sexual desire, nonetheless succumbs to such a temptation himself;
a position roughly similar to Nagel’s is defended by Scruton 1986, 96, 103-107, who speaks of the ‘non-
transferability’ of sexual desire.
91 Cf. Goodman 1976, 53: ‘Exemplification is possession plus reference.’

99 See the passage from Kant’s Lectures on Ethics quoted by Scruton 1986, 83: ‘Sexual love makes

of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside
as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry’ (trans. Infield).
100 The importance of this passage was clearly seen by Thompson 1868, 161.

101 The outstanding exceptions are Bruns 1900, esp. 22-24; Grube 1935. 115; Markus 1955; Neumann

1965, esp. 46; Vlastos 1981, 20-22; and Cummings 1976.

102 Throughout this essay 1 have been consistently applying to Platonic texts the familiar psychoanalytic

distinction between the source, aim. and object of a drive. 1 have done so because I believe this distinction
helps to make conceptually dear what is already implicit in Plato. Diotima’s discussion of eros, for exam-
ple, seems to be organized along the lines of the psychoanalytic distinction: she begins by describing the
source (literally, yfvtoic) of eros in mythopoeic terms at Svmp. 203b-204c: she then goes on to formulate
its aim (ti ¿pa: Svmp. 204d6, 204e3) at 204d-209e; finally, she reveals its object at 209e-212a. The same
distinction often provides a convenient conceptual means of differentiating among the various kinds of desire
discussed by Plato—e.g., Platonic epithymia and ‘Aristophanic’ eros: the former springs from a need or
lack, aims at gratification or hedone, and takes as its object a sample of a gratifying stuff, whereas the
latter springs from our unnatural condition of incompleteness, aims at a self-transcending union, and takes
as its object the lover’s ‘other half (or its surrogate).
103 Cf. Santas 1979, 69-70.

104 The same pun can be found at Cratylus 398d.

105 See Versenyi 1975, Glidden 1981; and cf. Kosman 1976. Gadamer 1980, 18-19, describes oikeiotes

in Plato’s conception as a property common to the objects of both need and desire.
104 Beversluis unpublished, n37. See, now, Vlastos 1984.

107 Another way of conceptualizing the difference between the aim and object of erds is to invoke the

distinction Aristotle draws in NE i 12 (1101b9-1102a4) between ‘prizing’ and ‘praising'. The erotic aim—
what the lover seeks to achieve—is what he prizes, on this account, whereas the erode object is what he praises.
,0' See Kenny 1963, esp. 112-126, whose entire treatment of desire is restricted to desire^ See, fur-
 197

ther, the considerably more sophisticated analysis by Bealer 1986, who writes, ‘An intentional act is about
objects only secondarily, inasmuch as it involves standing in an intentional relation to an intension that is
about those objects’ (253); even Bealer, however, allows for objectival relations that are directed to objects
without being about objects (in the sense of ‘about’ defined in the foregoing statement): see 254-255.
109
On this point, see the discussion by MacIntyre 1982, 304.
110
See Scruton 1986, 75-76, 85-86.
111
Cf. Neumann 1965, 38; Santas 1979, 71: “The intentional object of generic eras is the good rather
than the beautiful. . . . ’ The distinction between a generic eras for the good and a specific ems for the
beautiful, in Plato’s conception, goes back to Kranz 1926, 443.
112
Thus, the good is the sort of value that is susceptible of being either intrinsic and extrinsic or instrumen-
tal and final, whereas the beautiful is the sort of value that admits only of being intrinsic (the Form) and
extrinsic (beautiful particulars), according to the meta-distinction drawn by Korsgaard 1983.
I am moved but not, finally, persuaded by the subtle arguments of Moravcsik 1982, 30-32, who distin-
guishes between the beautiful’ and ‘the fine’, contending that the latter is the proper sense of to kalon in
Plato, except when kalon refers to what is ‘fine in appearance'—i.e., beautiful. The meaning of kalon is
not, in my view, a complex semantic problem involving the ancient tendency to collapse the vocabularies
of erotics and aesthetics; the word normally refers to the quality of being outwardly attractive or appealing,
like bello in Italian, and whereas in English ‘fine’ or fair’ may sometimes do greater justice to the connota-
tions of the Greek word, ‘beautiful’ is perfectly adequate for most purposes and usually does not lay Plato
open to the charge of equivocation. If I were to translate kalon in Plato by a more specialized or tendentious
philosophical term, it would be ‘valuable’: see Vlastos 1981, 49-52.
113
For a more detailed analysis, see Kranz 1926, 442-443; Wippem 1965; Santas 1979; Vlastos 1981,
20-22: and Chen 1983, esp. 66.
114
For a defense of this translation, see Vlastos 1981, 21n, 424; Bumyeat 1977, 14n5; and cf. Morrison
1964, 51-55; Neumann 1965, 39; Plass 1978.
115
On this image, see Dover 1980, 147.
Bruns 1900, 22.
117
On this passage, see Hackforth 1952, 4M2; Gould 1963. 113-116; Hyland 1968, 42; Friedlander
1969, iii 224-225; Dorter 1971, esp. 282-286; Brown and Coulter 1971; Irwin 1977, 238-239. I have here
reproduced some remarks previously published in Halperin 1986.
118
Cf. Gould 1963, 46-48, and see note 85, above.
1,9
Vlastos 1981. 28, 30; cf. Neumann 1965, 40, 44; Santas 1979, 72-74.
120
Cf. Neumann 1965, 44-47.
121
Voegeiin 1966, 13.
122
Cf. Kosman 1976.
123
Cf. Scruton 1986, 26-27.
124
For Plato’s location of desire, even appetitive desire, in the soul, rather than in the body, throughout
his writings after the Gorgias (esp. 517d) and the Phaedo, see Resp. 437b-439e; Phlb. 34d-35d.
125
To be sure, the Phaedrus contains scant indication that ems is for procreation in beauty rather than
for beauty tout court, but Socrates does emphasize the moral benefits that will accrue to lovers who realize
that their desire has a transcendental aim (245b, 253c, 256d-e), and so it might be fair to say that the rela-
tionship between lover and beloved in the Phaedrus instantiates but does not of itself generate Diotima’s
erotic ideal. On the compatibility of the doctrines of the Phaedrus and Symposium, see Irwin 1977, 323n62;
cf., generally, Moore 1973.
126
Cf. Chen 1983, 68nl6.
127
Cf. Singer 1966, 70-73, 87-88; Vlastos 1981, 32-33. Cf. also Scolnicov 1978, esp. 40-41.
128
Lucretius iv 1091-1101, makes the same point: 'nil datur in corpus praeter simulacra fruendum/tenvia'
(1095-1096); also, Plutarch, Mor. 759c, 765f-766a. Cf. Achilles Tatius, i 9.
129
On Plato’s contemptuous application of the word φλυαρία to mortal affairs, see Vlastos 1977, 34nll0.
130
On this image, see Clay 1985.
131
Vlastos 1981, 26; cf. Vtomer 1979.1 wish to thank Professor A. A. Long, erf the University of California
at Berkeley, for helping me to understand more clearly the nature of the objections which might be raised
to this aspect of Vlastos’ interpretation.
132
See, generally, Nussbaum 1979; see also Pater 1901, 126-142, for a classic statement of the connec-
tion between Plato’s erotic theory and his attentiveness to the particularity of human experience (as wit-
198

nessed chiefly by his literary art).

133
On the criteria for a sound reductive argument, see Nagel 1979, 175.
134
For an introduction to Lacan’s terminology, see Wilden 1968, esp. 185-200, and Lemaire 1977, 161-175;
cf. also Brenkman 1982,415-418. My own analysis of erotic phenomenology is roughly congruent with Lacan's
insofar as desireA corresponds to what Lacan calls need’, ultimate desire E to ‘desire’, and proximate desireE
to ‘demand’.
135
Cf. Neumann 1965, 49.
136
Glidden 1981, 40. Glidden’s argument, if accepted, would seriously undermine the interpretation
of the Symposium which Nussbaum 1979 bases on the personal testimony of Alcibiades.
137
Glidden 1981. 46-51.
131
Glidden 1981, 49. The roots of this view are securely Socratic: see Beversluis unpublished, n37:
‘This reference to the self is essential for understanding the Socratic Paradoxes. One’s conception of the
object will determine whether one desires it or not. The reason why knowledge cannot be “dragged about
by the passions like a slave’’ (Prot. 352b-c) is not because knowledge enables a person to resist the passions
but because knowledge enables its possessor to see his former object of desire under a new description:
for what it really is—an object which, if possessed, would be harmful rather than beneficial.’
139
Glidden 1981, 53.
140
Cf. Simmel 1921, 238. 241-242; Singer 1966, 72; Vlastos 1981, 26 (quoted in the text at note 131,
above); Nussbaum 1979. 145-150.
141
Gould unpublished, however, interprets this passage differently: ‘Even the best kind of paidemstia,
therefore, is only a dolos [or “fraud’’], not a necessary “step" at all.’
142
Cf. Kranz 1926. 445. In the Phaedrus, to be sure, Socrates omits to mention any of the intermediate
steps between the desire for one beautiful body and the desire for the Form of Beauty itself.
143
Cf. Proust 1954, vol. iii. 897-909; Vendler 1981, 26: ‘Denying itself the possession of the sacred
object, the soul finds identity. Acquiring an object means absorbing it into the soul and losing it from view;
renouncing it, the soul keeps it in view forever, and is able to see it clearly, free of projection. The sacred
object is exposed, its underlying body visible, its form known in the X-ray vision of desire, which by renun-
ciation is enabled into perception.’ For the economic analogue, compare Hyde 1983, esp. 21-23.
144
Chen 1983, 67; 69: ‘Scholars like to interpret this method of apprehending Ideas in terms of abstraction
and generalization, whereby they read empirical logic into Plato's theory of Ideas. In fact, there is neither
abstraction nor generalization for Plato as there is for later empiricists. The deindividualization of which
we spoke above is not abstraction. What is reached by abstraction is something common, but the beautiful
body deindividualized is still a particular body; it is just that its possessor is being disregarded.’ (The term
‘deindividualization’ derives, presumably, from Simmel 1921, 246.) Chen's point is well taken, but his line
of argument nonetheless seems very odd: after all, deindividualized beautiful bodies do indeed contain an
ideal, if not an actual, common element—namely, Beauty—and, as Chen himself acknowledges (68nl6),
insofar as they remain particular bodies after undergoing deindividualization they are irrelevant to the Idea.
145
Grube 1935, 114-115; Singer 1966, 76-80; cf. Ferguson 1959, 92; also, Hamilton 1951, 26: ‘After
that [i.e., the second rung of Diotima’s ladder] what Plato calls love is hardly what we recognize as love
at all, especially when he speaks of the moral beauty of laws and institutions as objects of love.’
146
Grube 1935, 115; cf. Brown and Coulter 1971, 415: ‘ . . . there is no reason at all to believe that
the metaphor of the philosopher as lover rests on a merely non-essential point of comparison. For Plato,
the activity of thought and the arousal of reflection in others both draw on the same deep sources of passion
which animate our sexual natures.’
147
Cf. Vlastos 1981, 29-30.
141
Kosman 1976, 61-62. See Chen 1983, 66-70; Matthen 1982, esp. 93, 96-97, together with the rejoinder
by McPherran 1983, for a helpful clarification of the sense in which individuated beauty is relative for Plato.
149 Nussbaum 1979, 147: ‘ . . . Socrates’ argument depends on a strong hidden assumption: that all

beauty, qua beauty, is uniform, the same in kind.’ I do not know of a passage in which Plato explicitly
articulates the doctrine that the beauty in a beautiful object x and the beauty in a beautiful object y (where
x and y belong to different genera or categories) is the same beauty. He does make it clear in the Phaedo
and Republic (passages cited in text, above) that beauty in respect to itself, qua beauty, is everywhere the
same—but for our purposes that is tautologous, a mere re-assertion that the Form is self-identical. Plato
sometimes suggests that the beauty of all particulars belonging to a single genus or category (e.g., bodies)
is ‘akin’ (¿SeX^c: Symp. 210bl), though by that word he may simply wish to express (as Chen 1983, 66-67,
 199

argues) the point of view of the initiate in erotics who perceives the kinship among the various instances
he encounters but does not yet consider the beauty in all bodies one and the same' (tv τε καί ταύτόν: Symp.
210b3), as he will do later on when and if he has completed the ascent. Plato also implies that the beauty
of particulars belonging to different genera or categories (e.g., bodies, laws) is related' (συγγενής: Symp.
210c5), though Chen's argument about άδελφός, as he observes (67nnl0, 11; 70n23), still applies (I follow
the implicit view of Moravcsik 1971, 288, that πάν αύτό αύτώ συγγενές έστιν refers inclusively and synopti-
cally to 'all of the levels’ of the ascent previously mentioned by Diotima). Elsewhere, Plato contents himself
with saying that physical beauty ‘copies’ or ‘imitates’ beauty itself (Phdr: 251a2-3), and he leaves the details
of the Form's parousia in the particular—the Form’s immanent character' (as Vlastos 1981, 84-86, calls
it) —notoriously vague (Phdo. lOOd: see Tarrant 1948, 33-34). But since in the case of other Forms, such
as Piety or Strength, Plato freely allows that the immanent characters manifested in particular instances
of the Form are qualitatively transcategorical (ή ού ταύτόν έστιν έν πάση πράξει τό οσιον αύτό αύτώ, καί τό
άνόσιον αύ του μέν όσιου πάντος εναντίον, αύτό δε αύτώ δμοιον καί έχον μίαν τινά ιδέαν κατά τήν άνοσιότητα
κίν οτιπερ άν μέλλη άνόσιον είναι; Euthyphro 5dl-5: cf. 6dl0-e6; Meno 72e4-73a3), and since in the case
of Beauty, the Form-manifestation in all members of a particular class of objects (i.e., bodies) is, as we
have seen, one and the same' (Symp. 210b3), it follows that in the ascent-passage of the Symposium the
beauty manifested in each of its instantiations is the same with respect to beauty: the beauty in a beautiful
,r and in a beautiful y must be the same beauty, though manifested differently in each case. Diotima’s lan-
guage abets this identification: she speaks of the lover άρχόμενον από τώνδε τών καλών εκείνου ένεκα τού
καλού άεί έπανιέναι (211cl-2). The ascent-passage, then, seems to be predicated on the assumption that the
beauty in laws is not merely (1) self-identical qua beauty, nor (2) generically self-identical in laws but differ-
ent from the beauty in bodies which is also unitary and self-identical within its class, but (3) the same beauty,
specifically and generically, as the beauty in bodies. For similar interpretations of Plato's position on this
issue, see, generally, Moravcsik 1971; Matthen 1982, 96-97.
150 Matthen 1982, 97; cf., generally, Moravcsik 1971. esp. 295: ... according to Plato not every
predicate expression stands for a Form, and ... the mere comprehension of a common element among
a plurality of particulars is not necessarily the comprehension of a Form'. More detailed consideration of
this matter would entangle us in the notoriously vexed questions surrounding Plato's treatment of immanent
characters (also called ‘Forms-in-things’, ‘Form-manifestations', ‘quality individuals’, immanent proper-
ties’, ‘attribute manifestations', and Form-instantiation (actors'). For an introduction to this topic, see Vlastos
1981, 76-110, esp. 84-92; most recently, McPherran 1982.
151 Singer 1966. 51-52; Moravcsik 1971, 291. Pace Demos 1934. 341: Grube 1935, 136: Comford 1950.

121 (though heavily qualified on 128-129); Dodds 1951, 213. 218-219. Cf. Beversluis unpublished. n37: ‘Hence,
for Socrates, desire is not to be suppressed but redirected to more adequate objects, to real rather than to
apparent goods.'
132 It is therefore a mistake to interpret Plato's sexual imagery in the literal way that Gould unpublished

does, assuming 'that Plato understood even the erection as a vivid response to the drawing power of the
upper regions of reality’. As Professor Vlastos has pointed out to me in a private communication, Plato
can describe the ultimate object of desire in either sexual or non-sexuai language, resorting to metaphors
drawn from Dionysiac possession-mysteries or Eleusinian vision-mysteries whenever he wants to produce
more intense or expressive effects without recourse to sexual comparisons. For a list of Plato's references
to Eleusinian vision-mysteries, see Scolnicov 1978,45n24: for a list of Plato's references to Dionysiac possession-
mysteries, see Anton 1962; Schein 1974, 163-166.
m Cf. Brown and Coulter 1971, 415; Scolnicov 1978. 44: ‘At the lower levels [of the soul] cognition

is minimal, obscure, and therefore the soul is able to relate only to objects which are not proper objects
of knowledge, viz., the objects of the sensible world. The same is true of the emotions: the soul's attraction
and repulsion at its lower levels are likewise related to improper objects. As the soul is shaped into higher
levels, its attraction is gradually directed to more adequate objects. But this is not another type of relation.
It is still a drive that has a cognitive element' (so, also. Moline 1978, 10-13). See Irwin 1977, 171: the development
of virtue is . . . both cognitive and affective'; also p. 173.
134 I hope to address these and other issues in The Metaphysics of Desire: Plato and the Origins of

Erotic Theory in the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
153 E.g., Murley 1946; Hackforth 1952, 10.

136 On this controversial point, see the sane remarks of Moravcsik 1971, 296-301: cf. Stough 1976, 21-22;

Mates 1979; Malcolm 1985.

¿w

157
Singer 1966, 85-90; Vlastos 1981, 31-32.
,5i
Vlastos 1981, 56.
159
See Vlastos 1981, 76ff.
140
Bruns 1900, 22-24.
161
Moravesik 1971, 290-291, proposes this substitution. I do not, of course, have any wish to deny
that Platonic erds is a form of aspiration.
142
See Bruns 1900, 20: 'Deshalb ist der von der kdrperlichen Schdnheit Ergriffene, ohne es zu wissen,
der htiheren Well ndher gebracht' \ Sinaiko 1965, 68: ‘Physiologically this [sight of the beloved] is merely
an act of visual sensation, but humanly it is far more than that; for in some degree it reminds man of the
transcendent beauty, “beauty itself,” which he once beheld directly in the “place beyond the heavens.”
When this reminiscence occurs, then in a quite concrete sense the man who experiences it, “beholds . .
. and feasts” on the “Being which truly is” in the very act of ordinary visual perception. Thus, according
to the myth [in the Phaedrus], the transcendent character of the contemplative act means that any ordinary
sensory experience of a soul within the physical universe may also be transcendent’; also, Sinaiko 1965,
90: ‘Thus, to see beauty in another human being and to make him or her one’s beloved remains the mark
of the true philosopher, but to the degree that any man finds beauty in another person he is partaking of
the “blessed” life of the philosopher’; Scolnicov 1978,45-46: ‘the knowledge of the good is not mere knowledge
but it is a unified activity of the soul, which includes cognition, desire and creation. At the lowest level,
it presents itself as sexual attraction, in which too there is a minimum of cognition, and physical procrea-
tion; at the higher level it appears as philosophical knowledge, whose necessary consequence is political
and educational activity.’
143
Cf. Proust 1954, vol. iii, 899n: ‘Chaque personne qui nous fait souffrir peut itre rottachee par
nous a une divinite dont elle n ’est qu ’un reflet fragmentaire et le dernier degre, divinite (Idee) dont la con-
templation nous donne aussitot de la joie au lieu de la peine que nous avions. Tout l art de vivre, c'est
de ne nous servir de personnes qui nous font souffrir que comme d’un degre permettant d’acceder a leur
forme divine et de peupler ainsi joyeusement notre vie de divinites. ’ For a comparative study of Santayana
and Proust, see Ames 1937. If Ehlers 1966, 65-90, is correct, it seems that Aeschines of Sphettus considered
eros within marriage to be a vehicle of ennoblement for both partners; Plato would seem to disagree (see
Vlastos 1981, 41-42).
144
Cf. Santas 1979, 74, who argues that Plato has constructed ‘what amounts to a theory of creativity
in the arts and sciences, rather than a theory of interpersonal love’.
145
Levy 1979; Price 1981.
144
See, generally, Notopoulos 1949; Holmes 1975, 429-438; Brown 1979, esp. 5-23, 117-149.

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Binghamton University
The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB)

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

12-1960

Reason and Eros in the Ascent Passage of the

Symposium
Julius M.E. Moravcsik
The University Of Michigan
Several commentators have emphasized that both reason and eros
play important roles in the passage.! My efforts will be directed
toward supplying an exact and detailed account of the relationship
between these concepts as they appear in this section. The usual
analysis
actual
Reason
proceeds
account
and Eros
by distinguishing
in the we’'Ascent’'
discover
- in-passage
accordance
a multitudeof
of the
withSymposium
Plato's
stepsown
summary (211c) - threeinvolving the levels of
or four diverse
ascent and the final vision.
activities
In view of ofitknowing, beloving, showing disdain,and creating.
Thethis
passage might thought
- Symposiurn that the
209e-212c - movement
There in which of the soul
Plato
should be divided
describes into the same three or fou r stages. Such a parallel
is more than one step to each level, and there are steps
construction,
man’s however,
accent
connecting toward would not understanding
adequate bring out the and fullvirtue
complexity
is oneand
variety
of of
the the soul's path. To be sure, in the
the levels. Accordingly, I shall outline a scheme which does summary Plato men-
best
tions known
only
justice the and most
rising widely
of the read
soul in
fromthe Platonic
level tocorpus.
level, It
but in the
has been
to this comp lexity. In this scheme I shall distinguish two
the
kindssubject
of of a vast literature. It would be impossible to
deal
steps; steps of reason (R -steps) and steps of eros (E -steps).
with all of the metaphysic al, epistemological, and ethical
Activi-
questions
ties of creation seem to be parts of E - or R-steps, and thus
which are raised by the account of this philosophic odyssey.
they will
The
not be distinguished in the scheme. As to the showing of
purpose
disdain, of this paper is limited to examining the roles which
reason
this can be regarded as a negative counterpart of love and
and eros play in the ascent, and to deal with some related
preference,
ontologi-
and thus will be classified as the work of eros.
cal issues .
The mere possibility of such a scheme is of importance.
For it
shows that though both reason and eros are involved in the
ascent,
the two must not be identified. It is true that steps of
reason and
steps of eros are interwoven and interrelated, but it is not
true that
each movement of the soul is the product of both. Reason and
eros
are interrelated but separate.2
An analysis along these lines yields the following scheme.
El. "he should love one body and engender within it
beautiful dis-
course" (210a7 -8).
Rl. "after this he should realize that the beauty of any one
body
is related to the beauty of any other body" (210a8 -bl).
R2. "and if one is to pursue beauty in accordance with
form,3 it is
folly not to regard beauty in all bodies as one and the
same"
(210b2-3).
E2. "having considered this one is to become the lover of
all
beautiful bodies and restrain one's zeal toward the one,
dis-
daining it and thinking little of it" (210b4 -6).
\

-2-

E3. "and after this to honor beauty in the soul more than
that
beauty which is in bodies so that if a proper soul had
even a
little bloom, this would suffice for loving and caring
for it,
and to seek and bring into being discourse that improves
the
youths" (210b6 -c3).
R3. "in order that he may be forced to behold beauty in
practices 4
and laws” (210c3-4).
R4. "and to see that all of these belong to the same kind"
(210c4-5)
E4. "so that he may show disdain toward the beauty of
bodies”
(210c5-6).
RS. ”and after the practices he should be led to the
sciences so
that he may see the beauty of these" (210c7).
R6. ”and looking at beauty in the many, not with regard to
the one
instant like a servant caring for the beauty of one
child or
man or practice, being a miserable slave limited in
thought;
but turning toward the wide sea of beauty, contemplating
it,
he would generate many beautiful and noble discourses
and
thoughts contained with in philosophy" (210c7 -d6).
R7. "until thus strengthened and nourished he shall grasp
the know-
ledge of the following sort of beauty (210d6 -el). (a
descrip-
tion of the Form of Beauty follows.)
The following considerations support the reason -eros
dichotomy
of this scheme. The verbs in all of the R -steps ("realize",
"regard",
"see") belong to that standard vocabulary within which Plato
usually
describes the work of reason alone. The E -steps as I
demarcated
them, exhibit a more complex structure. They contain more
than simple
acts of love. Nevertheless, in El, E2, and E 3 the verb "love"
in
various forms designates the key notion from which all
actions and
attitudes - some negative - contained in the steps are
derived. The
negative attitudes displayed toward pr evious objects of eros
are
clearly the result of the new positive reorientation of
aspirations,
and creativity seems to be dependent on the aspirations which
 -3-

El:Rl:H2:E2 equals E3:R3:R4:E4.

The claim that this quasi -mathematical structure is
intentional
with Plato is hardly in need of support. The need is rather
for a
detailed examination of the similarities as well as the
differences.
First we note that the E -H-h-E pattern is common to both
halves.
The significance of this lies in the fact that it reveals a
pattern
of interwovenness between reason and eros which shows neither
the
dominance of one over the other, nor a simple cycle of love
moving
reason and vice versa (that would be the E -R-E-R pattern).
Further-
more, we should notice that this division into halves
corresponds to
the first two levels of the ascent. Each half represents the
sum of
all steps taken on a certain plane. This shows that there is
an
E-h-R-E sequence on each level, and furthermore it shows that
the
transition from the first to the second level is the work of
eros and
not the work of reason; it is an E -E move, within our scheme.
In
addition to these general parallels a comparison of the
corresponding
individual steps reveals further striking similarities. Both
El and
E3 are positive steps of eros, and both initiate a sequence
of steps
on a certain given plane. Furthermore, both of these, and
these
alone within the first two -third of the path, are linked to
acts of
creation. I would like to claim also that both steps are
manifesta-
tions of eros toward something particular, and not to
something
general. This is quite clear in the case of El, but might be
dis-
puted in the case of E3. The first part of this step seems to
be a
description of a general preference of one kind to another.
But it
seems to me that reading this in conjunction wi th what
follows, the
key description is that of a man loving and caring for a
single soul,
preferring its beauty, no matter how meager, to the possibly
more
vivid beauty of other humans on the physical and aesthetic
plane.
Along with these similarities we find also a significant
difference.
El is purely positive, whereas E3, since it involves a
preference,
 -4-

path drawn in theSy mposium and the activities interwoven here

are
different from - though not incompatible - the scheme in that
famous
passage of the Republic.
Prior to linking my account of the E-steps with the
account of
the R-steps, I should like to show that these steps are
thought of by
Plato as causally connected. This is certainly not the only
way^o..'
conceive of these, nor is it the way which would fit best
the usual
accounts of Eros. Onemight want to view these steps simply
as
stages; termini at which the soul, guided by causal factors
from
within or the outside, arrives one after the other. It seems
to me,
however, that sufficient evidence is provided by the text for
the
claim of causal connections. To be sure, some of the phrases
con-
necting steps (210a9, bl, b6, c4, c7) indicate merely
conjunction and
temporal sequence, but the participial construction of 210b4
might
be taken as suggesting more than
that. The word "N/i* 1 1 is also
used (c3, c5 -6, c7) with the subjunctive. None of these
connectives
indicate clearly that one stage causes the following one to
occur,
though all of them are compatible with such a view. The
following
two passages, however, seem to me to point clearly toward the
inter-
pretation which I am suggesting here. 210c3 links R3 to the
previous
step by stating that the latter "forced" the soul to turn to
some-
thing new. This way of connecting steps seems to be
accountable only
if we assume that the previous st ep caused R3 to emerge. The
other
passage in question is 210d6 where R7 is introduced by a
reference to
R6 which seems to connect the two steps causally. The strength
and
nourishment which R6 provides seem to lead to R7. This is
surely
stronger than a mere temporal sequence. To sum up, the
connections
between steps are such that all of these can be explained
along the
lines of the causal hypothesis, and two of the passages cannot
be
explained by any except this hypothesis.
Given the "equation" and the causa l connections, what can
we
 -5-

of beauty on the spiritual level. This move is made possible

by the
previous conditioning of reason and it leads, in turn, to a
further
conditioning of '’nous". This mutual causal influence between
reason
and eros is significant. It demonstrates on the one hand that
Plato
did not subscribe to the "reason is but a slave of the
passions" type
of view. It shows also, on the other hand, that Plato was not
an
extreme rationalist in the sense that he did not regard the
role of
reason as consisting simply of repressing the erotic side of
human
nature. Indeed, this ballance between reason and eros raises
some
questions as to the nature of eros. For in the Phae do as well
as in
other middle period dialogues this repressive and controlling
func-
tion of reason is brought out. How are we then to think of
eros in
the b;ympqq;iumV In view of the above, one could hardly
equate it with
either the second or the third pa rt of the soul within the
trichotomy
of the Republic. It seems to me equally clear that it is a
notion
much more narrow than our usual conception of ’emotion' which
we con-
trast with reason. Finally, given the mutual causal
relations, we
cannot regard eros as t;ho motivating factor underlying all
human
actions. On the positive side, however, we can say this about
eros.
It is conditioned by reason and is in turn conditioning
reason. It
is "trans-categorical". Finally, it is not mere love or
desire, but
affection toward something in view of the nature of that
object.
It seems to me not inappropriate to sum up the positive side
of this
account as showing that eros is what we call "aspiration" as
opposed
to mere love or desire. One might venture to say that one of
the
crucial tasks of the Platonic "paideia" is the transformation
of mere
desire into aspiration. The crucial difference here is
between tak-
ing something as a mere object of immediate satisfaction and
t aking
something as an object of satisfaction on account of its
nature.
The latter move requires the intervening of reason and may
lead to the
contemplation of that nature, and then to the development of
 -6-

then there is no more reason for the postulation of eros as

an ad-
ditional entity, and we have in outline a psychological
theory which
is complex, plausible, and accounts adequately for the
variety of
factors which relate causally to human action. The interplay
of rea-
son and eros, as presented, is along the lines of the
principle of
internal harmony which is stressed so much in the Rep ublic.
Thus
eros stands simply for the wide variety of aspirations which
Plato
thinks of as the necessary accompaniments to the "life of
reason"
which he envisages both as a moral ideal and as a scheme
within which
knowledge can be gained.
To complete the interpretation of the lower part of the
ascent,
we have to deal with the acts of creation which are built
into the
pattern. In view of the fact that there are only three steps
related
to creation in the entire ascent, we shall deal with all of
these;
especially since it is my conviction that the interpretation
of the
"lower" acts of creation depends on how one takes all three
of these.
The path which precedes the perception of the Forms can be
divided
as moving on three planes: the aesthetic, the social, an d the
in-
tellectual. Each of these levels has one act of creation
associated
with it. The first two creations are linked with steps of
eros (El
and E3) and only the third one is part of an R -step (R6) thus
sug-
gesting that only the third type of creation is a work of
pure reason,
Yet all three kinds of creations are described as the
creation of
, (210a8, cl, d5). It seems most likely that the kind
of
produced is intrinsically connected with the kind of
step
to which its creation is linked, with the level on which it
appears,
and with the degree of rational insight which the soul at
that parti -
cular stage possesses. In the light of this consideration it
seems
best to identify the first discourse with poetry, the second
with
moral edification (of the type t hat Cephalus gives in Bk.I of
the
Republic) and the third with science and dialectic (this last
identi-
 -7-

Finally, the relationships between the R -steps seem to be

different
from those exhibited by the sequences of R -steps within the
lower
parts of the ascent. The first two differences are due to the
entire
lack of E-steps within this part of the path. Does this
absence in -
dicate that the soul in these final stages is without eros? To
con-
ceive of the beroe of this philosophic odyssey as a ma n
without pas-
sion, "apathetic", strikes one as utterly un -Greek, and such a
con-
ception is also difficult to reconcile with the creation of
philosophy
(within R6) and the "giving birth of true virtue 1 1 (212a)
which Plato
places within the last part. Bu ry, for one, insisted that eros
is
still at work in the last part of the path,6 but he did not
account
for the absence of E -steps - indeed this way of phrasing the
question
can not be found in his writings. Now it seems to me that the
pres-
ence or absence of E-steps do not determine whether or not
there is
eras in the soul; we may assume that Plato did not think of
any stage
of the human life as utterly without eros. Vihat the absence
of E-
steps indicates in the upper part is that eras here no longer
func-
tions as a guide. This explains also the difference between
the other
contestants who praise love as a supreme deity and Socrates
who makes
it quite clear that he is not doing this. He does not bestow
upon
love the superlatives which the others failed to spare; he
places
love in the "intermediate" category. At the end (212b7 -c3) he
says
that he praised eros "as much as he is able to" and he
confesses to
Phaedrus that this is the best he can do for eros, though
Phaedrus
might not even want to call this a h ymn of praise. The irony
of these
lines is explained not only by the whole treatment of eros in
the
speech, but especially by Socrates' calling eros the "best co -
worker
of human nature" (212b2 -4). The "phusis" referred to here is
clearly
reason, and eros i s aptly regarded as its best helper. Eros
can
serve as a guide, but only up to a point. This parallels the
treat-
ment of Virgil ln Dante's "Divine Comedy".
 -8-

be - in parallel with the moves from Rl to R2 and R3 to R4 - a

move
from instances to the general, or a move which enables one to
see
unity within a given class. Given Plato's conception of
knowledge,
the contemplation of its beauty leads one to turn away
completely from
the instance, the particular. And this is exactly what takes
place
within R6. This step provides the chief prerequisite for the
ability
to practice the dialectic method; the "turning toward t he wide
ocean
of beauty", referring obviously back to the sciences mentioned
before.
This "turning" is simply the determination to think in terms
of gen-
eral concepts and not in terms of the empirical and the
particular.
The process of gaining adequate un derstanding of the general
is the
process of "creating" philosophy; an act of creation which is
linked
with R6. How dialectic leads to R7, the apprehension of the
Form of
beauty, needs no explanation.
This analysis of the ascent has shown us how Plato
combines in a
single scheme a picture of the entire ontological landscape
and a view
of the educational process. We should not interpret the latter
as en-
tailing that each human has to traverse the entire path. For
those
whose life is dominated by physica l eros each of the steps is
a neces-
sary condition for the attainment of the next one. But the
more
gifted need not begin at the bottom; Plato does not rule out
the pos-
sibility of the young mathematical genius. It should be noted
also,
that for any given step the traversing of the previous steps
is not a
sufficient condition. What combination of factors within the
soul
are required for progress is problematical; any answer here
will de-
pend on what Plato took to be the imperishable part of the
soul, and
what this was is by no means obvious. We should remember here
that
the first step by itself indicates a certain degree of
achievement.
For El is not simply lust, but the sort of love of the
physical which
is linked with poetry. Many people never arrive ev en at El.
The
progress from El upward is not merely a movement from certain
 -9-

a common denominator. Vie m ight look for help to a suggestion

made
recently? according to which partaking amounts merely to
approxima-
tion. It becomes clear, however, from 2llb3 -5 that Plato does
not
have approximation in mind when he talks here about
participation.
For it is said that despite the participation the Form suffers
no in-
crease or decrease. If partaking meant approximation, this
statement
would be unnecessary. It seems to me that Plato wants the Form
of
beauty to be both a common denominator and a standard. This is
by no
means an inconsistent position. To say that the Form is a
common de-
nominator does not mean that it is a "compromise" or "mixture"
of the
subordinate levels. It means rather that all beautiful things
par-
take of it in some respect, and thus to some ex tent. The Form
char-
acterizes these pluralities deficiently in the sense that
nothing
particular is beautiful without qualifications.8
In this discussion it has been assumed that there is only
one
Form within the ascent, and that what one comprehends on t he
subordi-
nate levels are pluralities of particulars. This reading is
sup-
ported by Robin's observation that whereas the ascent is
gradual, the
final vision comes suddenly9. Still, this is not the only way
of
reading the passage. One might think that wh at the soul
comprehends
on each level is a species -Form. The object of the final
vision is
then a "second -order", generic Form of beauty which is above
the
Forms of Aesthetic, Social, and Intellectual beauty. The
language of
210b2-3 (R2) seems to support s uch a reading, and this view
would also
bring into harmony the ascent with what is called in the later
dia-
logues the method of collection and division. Nevertheless,
this
reading does not seem acceptable. The language of R2 can be
explained
in terms of the language of R4. Moreover, aside from Robin's
point
there are two considerations which count heavily against this
reading.
One is Plato's summary of the ascent (2llc). In this summary
Plato
describes the movement of the soul not as one from Form to
 - 10 -

proper name of the Form. Those who ascribe self -predication to

Plato
need to claim only that he believed 'beautiful' not to be a
mere
proper name but a term applied descriptively to the Form. It
seems
to me that the view according to which 'beautiful' is the
proper name
of the Form of beauty is most implausible. For proper names,
in con-
trast with descriptiv e terms, do not tell us anything about
their
bearers; they do not tell us what the bearers are, they do not
indi-
cate the nature of the bearers. To say of Mr. X that he is a
fine
citizen, a loving father, and a good lawyer is to say
something about
what he is. It is to describe him. But to say merely that his
name
is John is not to say anything about him. It is merely to name
him.
There seems to be little doubt that Plato thought of terms l 0
like
’beautiful' as not only baptizing the Forms but also
indicating their
nature. This does not mean that these terms have the same
meaning
when applied to the Forms as when applied to particulars. It
has been
said recently that once we recognize the ambiguity in Plato's
use of
general terms, the charge of self -predication disappears^.
This is
a non sequitur. Terms like 'beautiful' may apply descriptively
both
to Forms and to particulars, but in different ways. This is
indeed
the case, What may have tempted scholars into construing
general
terms as proper names of Forms is that according to Plato, any
given
general term designates uniquely one and only one Form. And
yet, we
should add, it does so while indicating the nature of the
Form. Thus
we should say that general terms apply to their respective
Forms with -
out qualif ication, and it is only to Forms that they apply
thus. In
this way, applied to Forms, general terms function for Plato
as
definite descriptions. When furnished with the suitable
qualifica-
tions they function as general descriptions of particulars.
So far I have shown only the plausibility of self -
predication
within the theory of Forms. Let us now survey the evidence
which
shows that in the ascent passage Plato thinks of 'beautiful'
as ap-
terms are merely naming the Forms ? Furthermore, there must be some -
thing within the nature of the Form that makes it the entity to which
a general term can be applied without restrictions, in a p aradeigmatic
- 11 -
way. But if general terms do not apply to Forms with descriptive
power, these applications can not function as standards from which all
the other applications are derived. To explain our ability to
des-these
ial entities
interpretations
which we one
can might
only baptize
come to is
theto conclusion
explain things
that
only
cribe and in a to understand by referring to unique, timeless, and
moment
the
immater sense
of utter
in which
confusion,
Moliere's and
goodpossibly
doctor poetic
"explains"
madness,
the could
a philo- of
capacity
sopher to
opium entertain
put peoplethisto theory.
sleep with
Now reference
it would be to useless
its dormitive
to deny
that
power.
self-predication
Objectionable as it
leads
ma y to
be,logical
it is difficulties.
self -predication On the
that other
gives
hand,
ex-
it seems to
planatory power
me that
to the
self theory
-predication
of Forms performs
as we finda useful
this inand the
much needed
middle
function in the theory of Forms, and that without it this
dialogues.
latter
theoryIn hardly
conclusion let us consider
says anything at all. the "end
After product"
all, of the
the postulation
ascent.
of
With the Greek
the Forms ideal
and the of "aner kaloskagathos"
accompanying epistemology are in mind we would
supposed to
expect
explain
the
how man at the
we are able end
to of the ascent
describe to have assimilated
and understand - as far as all of
the beauty
possible - the
of the successive
external world. Our stages, and to
asc ription of have arrived
general terms at to
a synthetic
particulars
vision
is
within which
presumably in there
some is room
sense a for the aesthetic
derivation as well
or imitation of as
thethe
social
proper and
as-
the intellectual.
cription of these Indeed, this is
to the Forms. how
Our Stenzel has and
understanding interpreted
the
describing of
final state
the Forms is of the soull4.
supposed Such a as
to function picture of harmony of
a paradigm is how
hardly
we
in should under
conflict
stand and with Plato's
describe moral philosophy.
particulars. But how Nevertheless,
could this this be if
conceptiongeneral
must be rejected, for it does not agree with the text. The
negative
steps of E2 and E4 indicate clea rly that the successive stages
are not
to be incorporated into one another, but that each step and
each level
has to be transcended and abandoned as the soul rises
gradually higher
The final vision is not an act of integration and
coordination, but
the intuiting of an entity not comprehended previously. 212a
shows
that Plato thinks of man in the final stage as being solely
occupied
with the contemplation of the Form of beauty. As Robin has
pointed
out, there are many parallels between the development of lif e
in the
course of the ascent, and the description of the philosophic
life in
the Phaedo. This places the ethics of the Symposium together
with the
more ascetic writings of Plato. The reconciliation of this
view with
the doctrine of internal harmony which we find in other middle
period
dialogues is a problem that lies beyond the scope of this
paper.
 FOOTNOTES

_ 1. E.g. Vvilamowitz -Moellendorf, Stenzel, Shorey, and

Grube.
2. For the opposite view, see R. Hackf^rth, "Plato's JAPicd-
p" p. 12.
3. There are, of course, two ways of reading this
expression. My
preference is based on my interpretation of R -steps in
general.
For a discussion of the alternatives see R.G. Bury's
"Symposium 1 1
p. 125.

4. The translation is here closer to that of Robin (Bude ed .

p. 68.)
than to the Jowett or Loeb renderings.
5. R.G. Bury op,, cii,„ p. XLVI.
6. R.G. Bury op. cit. p. XLVI.
7. R.E. Allen, "Participation and Predication in Plato’s
Middle
Dialogues" Philosophical Review vol. 69 (1960) pp. 147 -
164.

8. There is no mystery about how a particular can be

characterized
by a Form deficiently. The deficiency is manifested in
the quali
fications and restrictions that accompany the
predication. Of
course, I am assuming here that for Plato only the
"simple"
predicates and not all predicat e expressions stand for
Forms.
9. L. Robin, op. cit. p. 69.
10. We have to be^ careful to preserve the general and non -
technical
meaning of "ifvO ". This word means "term" in general, or
at
most '’noun' 1 in particular. It does not have the
technical mean -
ing of "proper name" though it covers proper names too.

11. R.E. Allen, op. cit. p. 148 ff.

12. G. Vlastos "The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides"
Philo-
sophical Review vol. 63 (1954) pp. 319 -350.

13. R.E. Allen op. cit. p. 148.

14. J. Stenzel "Platon der Erzieher" p. 277.
 V

THE INDIV IDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE

IN PLATO

GREGORY VLASTOS

I
‘Let φιλεϊν be defined,’ writes Aristotle in the Rhetoric, ‘as wishing for
someone what you believe to be good things—wishing this not for your
own sake but for his—and acting so far as you can to bring them about.’1
The same thing is said about φίλος in the essay on friendship in the Nico-
machean Ethics: ‘They define a φίλος as one who wishes and acts for the
good, or the apparent good, of one’s φίλος, for the sake of one’s φίλος; or
as one who wishes for the existence and life of one’s φίλος for that man’s
sake.’2 In the standard translations of these passages φίλος comes through
as ‘friend’, φιλεϊν as ‘friendly feeling’, and φιλία as ‘friendship’. This blunts
the force of Aristotle’s Greek, as should be clear from one of his illustra-
tions: maternal affection is one of his star examples of φιλεϊν and φιλία;1
would ‘friendly feeling’ do justice to what we normally have in view when
we speak of a mother’s love for her child? Or again, consider the com-

From Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies (Princeton University Press, 1973), 3-34. Copyright
© 1973 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
This chapter is a slightly revised form of an address at the University of Montana on 5 May
1969, at a celebration honouring the retirement of Professor Edwin L. Marvin, who had served
the university with distinction as a teacher and founder of its department of philosophy. I have
read drafts to other groups and profited from their criticism. My greatest debt is to the members
of the Philosophical Discussion Club of Cornell University, and most particularly to Norman
Kretzmann and William Nelson, who helped me detect a confusion from which no earlier draft
had been free. I must also express thanks to Charles Kahn, Richard Rorty, and Terry Irwin for
suggestions and criticisms which enabled me to correct other mistakes.
' Rh. I380b35-1381'T:... την φιλίαν και το φιλεϊν υρισάμενοι λέγωμεν. έστω όή τό φιλεϊν τό
βούλεσ&αί τινι (i οϊεται άγαϋά, εκείνου ενεκα άλλα, μη αυτού, και τό κατά όνναμιν ιτρακτκόν είναι
τούτων.
2
ΕΝ 1166η2-5: τιϋέααι γάρ φίλον τον βουλόμενον καί κράττοντα τάγαΟά η τά φαινόμενα εκείνον
ενεκα, ή τον βουλόμενον είναι καί ζήν τον φίλ.ον αυτόν χάριν.
y
The second citation runs on: ‘as mothers do for their children'. Parental affection is used to
illustrate φιλία already in the first chapter of the Essay on φΰία (ΕΝ 8.1). Cf. my reference to
1159'27-33 in the third paragraph of this essay.
138 GREGORY VLASTOS

pounds: φιλάργυρος, φιλότιμος, φιλόνικος, φιλόκαλος, and so forth: twenty-

two columns of them in Liddell and Scott, φιλάργυρος, is Greek for ‘miser’.
A man would need to have something considerably stronger than ‘friendly
feeling’ for money to live up (or down) to that name. Much the same would
be true in the case of the vast majority of the other compounds. ‘Money-
lover’, ‘honour-lover’, etc. would be the best that we could do to approach
the natural sense of the Greek words. ‘Love’ is the only English word that
is robust and versatile enough to cover φίλεϊν and φιλίαf Nor is there any
difficulty in seeing why Aristotle should undertake to define ‘love’ in order
to elucidate the meaning of‘friendship’: he thinks of friendship as a special
case of interpersonal love.
So what Aristotle is telling us is that to love another person is to wish
for that person’s good for that person’s sake, doing whatever you can to
make that wish come true. This is not meant to be a run-of-the-mill defini-
tion. Its purpose is not to explain all uses of φιλείν, but only those that
answer to what Aristotle takes to be its ‘focal meaning’5—to capture the
kind of love we can have only for persons and could not possibly have for
things, since in their case it would make no sense to speak of wishing for
their own good for their own sake: ‘It would be absurd, no doubt,’ says Aris-
totle, ‘to wish good for wine; if one wishes it at all, it is that the wine may
keep, so that we may have it for ourselves.’6 He says this, knowing quite
well that love for persons could be just like love for inanimates in this
crucial respect. This is how Swann loves Odette in Swann's Way. At the
height of his infatuation he is so far from wishing for her good for her own
sake that he is scarcely capable of thinking of her at all except as an adjunct
4
As is shown, for example, by the fact that the translator is compelled to use ‘love’ when
translating the verb φιλείν and that the commentators shift without apology to love* and
‘beloved’ when they gloss φιλείν and φίλον in the Lysis. 1 say that ‘love’ covers these Greek
terms, bearing in mind that its connotation is considerably broader, since it does also the work
of εράν, which overlaps with φιλείν, but differs from it in three respects: (i) it is more intense,
more passionate (cf. Plato, Lg. 837a: όταν δε εκάτερυν [sc. φίλον] γίγνηται σφοδρόν, 'ερωτu
έπονομάζομεν); (ii) it is more heavily weighted on the side of desire than of affection (desire,
longing, are the primary connotations of epwg,fondness that of φι/.ία)\ (iii) it is more closely tied
to the sexual drive, (though φιλείν may also refer to sexual love [LSJ. s.v. φιλείν. 3]): for non-
incestuous familial love one would have to turn to φιλία in lieu of ερως (cf. Plato. Smp. 179c:
Alcestis had φιλία for her husband. Admctus, and so did his parents; but ‘because of her ερως
for him she so surpassed them in φιλία' that she was willing to die in his place, while they were
not).
5
A useful term we owe to G. E. L. Owen (‘Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of
Aristotle’, in I. During and G. E. L. Owen (eds.), Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century
(Goteborg, 1960), 169) for what Aristotle calls προς εν /.εγόμενον (a phrase applied to the defi-
nition of φιλία in the Eudemian Ethics 1236Λ16-^27) on which, see ‘Justice and Happiness in the
Republic', in Platonic Studies. 111-39 n. 60.
6
H55b29-31.Thc parenthesis which Bywaler closes here in the Oxford text should rather
close at the end of the immediately following remark which explains the point of the example:
τω όέ φίλω φασι δεϊν βού/,εσθαι χαγαθά εκείνον ενεκά).
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 139

to his own existence. A chance remark about her from someone who had
seen her in an outfit she had never worn for him comes as a shock: ‘It upset
him because it made him realize all of a sudden that Odette had a life
which was not wholly his’.7 Aristotle recognizes two varieties of this kind
of love, admitting them as φιλίαι of an incomplete, imperfect kind: ‘φιλία
δι’ ηδονήν, φιλία διά το χρήσιμον’,8 ‘pleasure-love’, ‘utility-love’, affective
bonds with men or women whose good we want because they serve our
need, or interest, or pleasure, and for no other reason.
But suppose we do wish for someone’s good for his own sake. Must we
then forfeit utility and pleasure? Not necessarily, Aristotle would insist,
and not at all when the relation is ‘complete’ or perfect φιλία. In friend-
ships with good and noble men one who is himself good and noble will
find both profit and delight;9 so he will love his friends for his own sake as
well as for theirs. This is the only kind of love that gets a high rating in
Aristotle’s design of life. What then of that mother, in one of his examples,
whose children, separated from her, do not know her, while she loves them,
wishes for their good and works for it, yet gets nothing from them in return,
and expects nothing (1159a27-33)? Though he cites this as evidence
(σημεϊον) that ‘love is thought to consist more in loving than in being
loved’,10 * it will not fit his concept of‘perfect’ φιλία. So what could he have
made of it? He does not say. Either he fails to see that his concept of φιλία
makes no provision for this and other hard cases or, if he does, the dis-
crepancy does not disturb him. The only love of persons as persons that
really interests him is that between the members of a social élite, each of
whom can afford disinterested affection for his peers, assured in advance
that he will normally have theirs in return, so that ‘in loving the friend each
will love what is good for himself.11 That Aristotle’s notion of‘perfect’ love
should be so limited is disappointing.12 But this does not spoil it for my
purposes in this essay. All I need here is to find a standard against which
to measure Plato’s concept of love—a standard from his own time and
place, so that I would not have to risk gross anachronism by going with

7
‘Ce simple croquis
bouleversait Swann parce
qui’il lui faisait tout d’un
s
coup EN apercevoir 8.3-
qu’Odette
5,1156 a
avail une
6ff.These φιλίαι
are vie qui
n’étaitσυμβεβηκός\
κατά pas tout 1156 entirea17-a
18.They
lui..A la are called φιλία
recherche du temps‘by
9
This is (καΰ'
similitude'
perdu, implied ομοιότητα; i,
1157 a
Pléiade 31-2;
unambiguouslyedn. ομοίωμα
cf. (Paris, εγεν,
in his 1954),
,ϋ
240.
1157*1)
discussion ofof
thewhat
EN 1159*27-8, [φιλία]
calls isδοκέϊ... έν ιω φιλεϊν μάλλον ή έν τώ
kindhewhich
‘truly’
ί1
‘τελεία
ENφιλία"
φιλεϊσϋαι 1157είναι.
h
in (ώ* τον φίλον ιό αύτοις άγα&όν
και φιλονντες
33,1156*7 ff.,
άλ-ηΰώς),
‘μάλιστα
φιλοϋσι.
12
Cf. η. φιλία' ‘primarily’
100,inbelow.
1157bl-
:
(πρώτως),
1158 'l. and ‘strictly’ or
‘chiefly’ (κυρίως) φιλία
(1157*24, 30-1), the only
kind Aristotle considers
‘complete’ or ‘perfect’
(retace) φιλία
(1156*34,1158*11).
140 GREGORY VLASTOS

Anders Nygren1·’ so far afield as the New Testament. This standard Aris-
totle does supply. That to love a person we must wish for that person’s
good for that person’s sake, not for ours—so much Aristotle understands.
Does Plato?

II

I start with the Lysis—one of those earlier dialogues where Plato’s thought
still moves within the ambit of his Socratic heritage. 14 What does Socrates
here make of φιλία? Consider this exchange:
'And shall we be dear (φίλοι) to anyone, and will anyone love us (φιλήσει), in those
respects in which we are unprofitable (άνωφελ,εϊς)?'
Of course not,’ he said.
‘So your father does not love (φιλεϊ) you now, nor do others love anyone so far
as he is useless (άχρηστος)?'
‘Evidently not,’ he said.
‘So if you become wise (σοφός), my boy, everyone will love you and all will be
your οικείοι15—for you will be useful and good—otherwise no one will love you:16
Neither your father nor your mother nor your οικείοι.’ (210c-d)
‘Useful’ and ‘profitable’ in Plato—as in Greek usage generally—must not
be given the narrow sense these adjectives ordinarily have in English. Plato
uses them to cover any attribute—physical, economic, aesthetic, intellec-
tual, or moral—that makes the one who has it a valuable asset. It is as broad
as ‘good-producing’, with no strings on the kind of good produced; and with
Socrates as the speaker we can count on a bias in favour of moral and spir-
itual good. Socrates then is saying that a person will be loved if, and only
if, he produces good. Produces it for whom? Jowett translated as though
our text had said that A will love B only if B produces good for A.'1 If that
'·' Eros and Agape, irans. P. S. Watson. Harper Torchbook (New York, 1969)—a distinguished,
influential, and very one-sided book, whose treatment of the ‘Greek’ idea of love fails to reckon
with the elementary fact the philia is a ncar-synonym of agape, and that, regardless of what their
philosophers said, Greeks, being human, were as capable of genuine, non-egoistic, affection as
are we. Ignoring philia (save for a passing notice of the Lysis on p. 180, where Nygren trans-
lates the word by ‘friendship’ and uses the dialogue as further evidence ‘of the egocentric nature
of Eros’ in Plato, p. 181 n. 3), he fails to take the slightest cognizance of Aristotle’s conception
of it.
,J
See Platonic Studies, app. I.
,5
Literally‘w [or of] the house'.hare ‘family relation, kinsman' in the extended sense of‘inti-
mate*.‘near and dear’.
16
Good examples in this citation of the unavoidably of the resort to‘love’ when translat-
ing the verb philein.
yl
His rendering for 210c5-8 reads: And shall we be friends to others, and will any others love
us, in matters where we are useless to them?—Certainly not.—Then neither does your father
love you, nor does anybody love anybody else, in so far as he is useless to himT The italicized
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 141

were right, what Socrates calls ‘love’ would coincide with Aristotle’s utility-
love: the Socratic lover would look on those he loves simply as sources of
benefits to him. But the text does not say this. For all that is said there to
the contrary, A might love B because B produces benefits for a third person
or for a group or groups of persons or, for that matter, for B himself. So far,
then, Socrates has said nothing which could fairly be said to endorse the
egocentricity of utility-love. Yet neither has he made a place, even margin-
ally, for what we found at dead centre in Aristotle’s conception of love:
wishing another person’s good for that person’s sake. Nothing of this is said
or even hinted at in our passage. There is not a word here to imply that
Lysis’ father and mother love him when he is ‘wise’ because they see how
beneficial it would be for Lysis if he were wise, and that they wish this for
him just because their loving him means wishing for his own good for his
own sake. What Socrates says of their love for the boy would have been
perfectly true even if they had happened to be arrant egoists who wanted
their son to be sensible and well-behaved only because of the trouble this
would spare them and the credit it would bring on them. So egoistic love
is not excluded, though, so far, neither is it implied.
But as we go on reading in the dialogue we find that it is implied, in
effect, after all.18 This happens when Socrates goes on to argue (213eff.)
that if A loves B, he does so because of some benefit he needs from B and
for the sake of just that benefit: the sick man loves his19 doctor for the sake
of health (ένεκα νγιείας\ 218e); the poor love the affluent and the weak the
strong for the sake of aid (τής έπικονρίας ένεκα; 215d); ‘and everyone who
is ignorant has affection and love for the one who has knowledge’ (ibid.)
This is straightforward utility-love: the doctor, the rich, the wise are loved
by one who needs them for what he can get out of them, and no reason is
offered why we could love anyone except for what we could get out of
him. The egoistic perspective of‘love’ so conceived becomes unmistakable
when Socrates, generalizing, argues that ‘if one were in want of nothing,
one would feel no affection ... and he who felt no affection would not

words answer to nothing in the Greek text. Similar mistranslation of the second sentence in the
Pleiade translation by L. Robin, Έη consequence, ton pfcre non plus, dans la mesure oil tu ne
lui es bon a rien, n’a done pas d’amitie pour toi’ (my emphasis). The passage had been correctly
translated in the Bud6 translation by A. Croiset (Plato’s Hippias Major, Charmides, Laches, and
Lysis, 4th edn. (Paris, 1956)).
iR
It must have been an unconscious anticipation of this sequel that led Jowett to mistrans-
late the earlier passage.
,9
The pronoun is not in the text. But the reflexive reference is definitely implied in the
context. TTius Socrates observes at 217a that ‘no one. while healthy, loves a doctor for the sake
of health’: so when persons ‘love a doctor for the sake of health’ it must be for the sake of the
health they have lost and wish, with their doctor’s aid, to regain. And cf. the next note.
142 GREGORY VLASTOS

love’.20The lover Socrates has in view seems positively incapable of loving

others for their own sake,21 else why must he feel no affection for anyone
whose good-producing qualities he did not happen to need?22
Socrates then goes on to argue that just as we love the doctor for the
sake of health, so we love health for the sake of something else; hence,
short of an infinite regress, there must be a πρώτον φίλον, ον 'ένεκα και τά
20
215b—c: ό δέ μή τον δεόμενος ουδέ τι άγαπφη αν ... ονδ' αν ψιλοί. This is reinforced by the
genera) formula in 218d7-9: When A loves B it is always for the sake of (ενεκά του) something,
x. and because of something (διά π), y, where x ranges over goods and y over ‘evils’ remedied
by the appropriate values of x. The ‘evil’ here stands for a remediable deficiency in A which B
has power to remedy: \ .. that which desires, desires that of which it is in want.... Hence that
which is in want loves that of which it is in want..(221d7-e2).This is Socrates’ last word on
this aspect of the topic (and, therefore, reassures us that the question in 215c3-4, ‘But tell me.
Lysis, in what way (πή) have we gone off the track? Are we perchance wholly mistaken?’, is not
meant to invalidate everything in the preceding paragraph and, in particular, is not meant to
impugn the statement that ‘if one were in want of nothing one would feel no affection’).
This feature of the theory of philia in the Lysis is conserved and elaborated in what Ϊ take to
be the Socratic component in the theory of eros expounded in the Symposium, i.e. in Socrates’
dialogue with Agathon (I99c-20!c) and in the first part of his dialogue with Diotima
(201d-206a): what we learn about love here is that it is caused by a deficiency in the lover and
expresses the lover’s longing for the good whose possession will relieve the deficiency. (For the
shift in perspective at 206b, cf. Markus in n. 56 below, and the first paragraph of Sect. IV and n.
58). This notion finds its complement in the thesis, emphasized in both dialogues (more briefly
in the Lysis (216d-217a), at greater length in the Smp. (201b-204c)), that the lover is in a con-
dition intermediate between goodness and evil, or beauty and ugliness, hence qua lover neither
good nor evil, neither beautiful nor ugly: if he were wholly the former, he would have no need
to love.
it might be objected that Socrates cannot mean to endorse this view of love, for it would
belie his own profession of love for his fellow citizens: he says that he loves them (Ap. 29d), but
docs not impute to them either wisdom (just the opposite!) nor any other quality which would
elicit utility-love. But what does this prove? Can’t a man be better than his theory? And what
precisely is the ‘love’ which Socrates professes for his fellows? Does it measure up to the Aris-
totelian definition? I do not think so, but to argue out the point would require an extended dis-
cussion which I cannot pursue here. Cf. n. 9i below.
" R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif take no account of this passage when they see the Lysis as an
expression of Tamour de bienveillance ou amour desinteresse’ (L'fcthique a Nicomaque»ii/2.
books 6-10,2nd edn. (Louvain, (1970), 671; cf. 726). Since they do not argue for this extraordi-
nary suggestion, one is reduced to surmise as to how it ever occurred to them that this is the
message of the Lysis. What apparently suggested it to them is the example in 219e2-220b5 (cf.
n. 23 below): they quote this passage in full (pp. 670-1) and cap the citation with a remark which
shows that they are taking the father’s love for the wine and his love for the son to stand respec-
tively for ‘amour dc concupiscence’ and ‘amour desinteresse’, without a word of explanation or
argument to convince us that this is what Plato is illustrating in this passage. What he says he
is illustrating is concern for an object which is valued not for its own sake, but for the sake
of another (πάσα ή τοιαύτη σπονδή ονκ έπι τούτοις έστιν έοπονδαυμένη, έτύ τοίς ενεκά
τον παραοκευαζομένοις. άλλ' επ' εκείνω ου ενεκα πάντα τά τοιαϋτα παρασκευάζεται; 219e7-220al).
One wonders if they are confusing the difference between instrumental and intrinsic value
(which is the immediate point of the example) with that between egoistic and non-egoistic val-
uation, losing sight of the fact that the former difference would be as valid for the egoist as for
anyone else: there is no reason in the world why an egoist should not attach intrinsic value to
certain things, desiring them as ends (his ends), not as mere means.
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 143

άλλα φαμέν πάντα φίλα είναι—a ‘first [i.e. terminal] object of love, for
whose sake, we say, all other objects are loved’ (219d), this being the only
thing that is ‘truly’ (ώς άληϋώς) or ‘really’ (τώ δντι) loved—or, more pre-
cisely that should be so loved. There is danger, Socrates warns, that ‘those
other objects, of which we said that they are loved for its sake, should
deceive us, like so many images23 of it’ (219d2-4). So unless a man we loved
actually was this πρώτον φίλον, it would be a mistake to love him ‘for his
own sake’, to treat him, in Kant’s phrase, as ‘an end in himself.24 We would
then stand in need of a philosopher, like Socrates, to cure us by his dialec-
tic, to break the illusion, and make us see that what we ‘really’ love is some-
thing else.25 What is it then, this sovereign πρώτον φίλον1. All Socrates
seems to be prepared to say is that it is ‘the good’;26 and ‘the good for any
given person’ Socrates understands to mean: what makes that person
happy.27 For something more definite we must go to the dialogues of Plato’s
23
Or ‘phantoms’ (είδωλα). In the terms of the accompanying example (219d5 ff.), the mistake
would be to put such a value on wine as to refuse it to one’s son when he is in mortal need of
it, having drunk hemlock for which the wine is the only available antidote. In the analogy the
father’s love for the wine stands to love for his son as would love for a particular person to love
for the πρώτον φίλον. It would be hard to think of a stronger way of making the point that in
our love for persons we should not treat them as ‘ends in themselves’ (cf. the next note).
24
For an interpretation of this phrase, see G. Vlastos, ‘Justice and Equality’, in R. Brandt (ed.),
Social Justice (Englewood Cliffs. NJ, 1962,) 48-9 and notes. Aristotle’s ‘wishing another’s good
for his sake, not for yours’, though still far from the Kantian conception of treating persons as
‘ends in themselves’, is the closest any philosopher comes to it in classical antiquity.
25
Just as ‘it is not altogether true (ούδέν τι μάλλον οντω τό γε άληΰές εχν)' that we set great
stock by money, since we give it up readily when we find things wc want to buy with it, so too
‘it is only in a manner of speaking (ρήματι... λέγοντες) that we say we “love” what is loved for
the sake of something else; it looks as though what is really loved (φί)-ον ... τφ ovn) is that
very thing in which all of these so-called loves terminate (εκείνο αυτό... εις ο πάσαι αύται at
λεγόμενοί φι?Λαι τελευτώοιν)' (209a2-b3). To say of another person that he or she is what we
really and truly love would be to lapse, like the miser, into moral fetishism.
2A
*... hence the good is loved? (α2Λ’ άρα τό άγα&όν έστιν φί/.ον;)' (220b7)—a surprisingly
casual and elliptical answer: it does not say that the good is the πρώτον φίλον, though this is
doubtless what is meant. Socrates must think the proposition that the good is the πρώτον φίλον
so truistic that it does not even call for a formal statement, let alone defence, in the present
context. His attitude is perhaps understandable, given his standing conviction that the good is
the only (real) object of desire (Grg. 467c5-468c7, which concludes,‘for we desire those things
which are good ... while those which are neither good nor evil we do not desire, nor yet those
which are evil’; cf. Meno 77cl-c4), and his present contention that ‘desire is the reason (αιτία)
for love, and we love that which we desire and when we desire it’ (221d2-4).
27
This is regarded as axiomatic in the Socratic dialogues, though never formally spelled out.
It shows up, for example, in the Meno (77c ff.), where the thesis that no one can desire evil things
knowing that they are evil is proved by arguing that ‘no one desires to be wretched and miser-
able’ (78a4-5), or in the Euthydemus (278e2-282d: the protrepsis to philosophy), where it is
argued that wisdom is the greatest of all goods because it alone enables us to use any other
good in such a way as to make us happy (ενόαψονεϊν, εν πράττειν), the presupposition of the
argument being that anything will be good for any person if, and only if, it makes that person
happy.
144 GREGORY VLASTOS

middle period. Only there do we find the new theory of love which we can
call distinctively Plato’s.

Il l

The ideal society of the Republic is a political community held together by

bonds of fraternal love.28 The Allegory of the Metals which epitomizes its
ethos pictures all citizens as children of the same mother, the Earth (= the
polis). They are told: ‘You are all brothers in the polis... all akin .. Λ21'
They are expected to have the same solicitude for the welfare of the polis
which men ordinarily feel for that of their own family. Those appointed to
govern must excel not only in intelligence and all-round ability but also in
their concern for the welfare of the polis, which is said to be a function of
their love for it: One is most concerned for what one loves’ (κήδοιτο όέ γ’
άν τις μάλιστα τούτου δ τυγχάνει φιλών; 412d). Radical institutional inno-
vations are to ensure that this affection will be wholehearted, undistracted
by economic self-interest, on the one hand, by special attachments to kith
and kin, on the other. The whole of the ruling class now becomes a single
communal family, where no one is an ‘outsider’30 and everyone is ‘a brother
or sister or son or daughter’ or other kin ‘to everyone he meets’. 31 The
Though one would hardly guess this from much that has been written about Plato’s social
theory. Not a word about political philia in Plato in T. A. Sinclair, Greek Political Theory
(London, 1951): in the index under philia there are references to Protagoras and five other
authors, but none to Plato. Sheldon Wolin, in his acute critique of Plato’s political philosophy
Politics and Vision (Boston, 1960), duly reports (p. 47) the doctrine of the Politics that ‘the end
of the royal art was ... a community bt&md together in “a true fellowship by mutual concord
and by ties of friendship’* * (31 lb9-cl); But nine pages later he says that ‘it required the Chris-
tian notion of agape before there couidOe an idea of love as a force fusing together a commu-
nity*. He evidently has no inkling of the fact that Plato expects philia to be just such a force.
The same is true of the study of Plato’s contribution to social theory. Enter Plato (New York.
1964), by the sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner. He says that while Plato ‘speaks well of friendship*
(p. 244), he ‘removes love from the Pantheon of virtues... strip[s) it of moral relevance’ (p.
246). One wonders how so imaginative a student of Plato’s social theory could say such things
in view, for example, of the fact that in the Laws the three goals that are to guide all legislation
are that the state should be intelligent, free, and '¿αυτή φίλη’ (693b-e,701d;cf. also 628a-c. 640d,
697c, 698c, 699c, and especially 743c and 759b). Part of the trouble seems to be that he gets Plato
via the Jowett translation, where φίλη is turned into ‘harmonious’ or ‘at unity with itself’ and
φιλία into ‘friendship*. Yet even the Jowett translation might have given Gouldner reason to
doubt that ‘friendship’ is what Plato means here. Thus in 698c one should be able to tell just
from the context that Jowett’s ‘spirit of friendship’ is a feeble understatement of what is being
talked about: the embattled comradeship, the fraternal solidarity, that flared up among the Athe-
nians at the time of the Persian invasion.
:v
εοτέμέν γάρόή πάντεςοίεντή πόλει άδελφοί... άτε ουν συγγενείς όντες πάντες ... (4I5a2-8).
And cf. 414e5-6. και υπέρ των άλλων πολιτών ώς άόελφών δντων <όεί> ... ύιανοεϊοϋαι.
A. Bloom's happy rendering of άλλότptoc (antonym of οίκεΐος) (The Republic of Plato
(New York, 1968)). ’’ 463b-c.
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 145

maxim of this extended family is that ‘φίλοι have all things in common, so
far as possible’.32 The last four words explain why the same institutions are
not laid down for the producers in spite of the fact that, as the Allegory of
the Metals so clearly implies, all of the members of the polis are expected
to be φίλοι: if the communistic property and family arrangements do not
apply to them, this must be due only to the fact that Plato does not think
these institutions would be practicable in their case, however desirable
ideally for all.33 But there can be no doubt of his confidence that they too
will feel love for their motherland and for their rulers, who are their ‘sav-
iours and helpers’ (463b) and think of them as ‘φίλοι and sustainers’ (547c).
In a postscript which gives in a nutshell the rationale of the beneficent sub-
jection of the producers to the philosophers we are told that those who
are ‘naturally weak in the principle of the best’ (i.e. of reason) ought to be
governed by those who are strong in this principle ‘so that we may all be
alike and φίλοι so far as possible, all governed by the same principle’.34
Subjection35 to another’s will is justified on the assumption that it may not
only coexist with, but also promote, φιλία.
Since we are given no formal definition of φιλία and φίλος in the Repub-
lic, let us try out what we heard from Socrates in the Lysis. ‘You will be
loved,’ Socrates had told Lysis there, ‘if and only if you are useful.’ Does
this fit the Republic? It fits perfectly. The institutions we find here appear
designed from start to finish to make it possible for people to have each
others’ affection if, and only if, each ‘does his own’,36 i.e. performs to the
best of his ability that complex of activities through which he is best fitted
by nature and nurture to make his greatest possible contribution to his
polis. In doing this he would fulfil the Platonic norm of δικαιοσύνη: he
would discharge all of his obligations, and earn all of his rights. For our
present purpose the latter is the important point. Whatever a man can
rightly claim from others in the Republic is tied to the performance of his
” 424a; cf. 449c.
“ Cf. Laws 739c-740b, where thoroughgoing communism in both property and family is pro-
claimed as the ideal (it represents 'the best polis and laws, the most excellent constitution'), but
private allotments and private families are accepted since the pure ideal would be 'beyond the
capacity of people with the birth, rearing and training we assume' (740a).
34
590c-d. Cornford, for once, misses the sense by a mile when he translates o/ioiot here by
'equal' (as I did too in 'Slavery in Plato's 'Thought', Philosophical Review, 50:292, in 1941:1 have
corrected to ‘alike’ in the reprint): the word could, of course, mean equal in certain contexts;
but equality between subject and ruler is the last thing Plato would tolerate, let alone commend;
and that ‘alike’ is the sense here follows directly from its use in c8, ύπό όμοιου άρχηται, to which
τιυ αύνώ κνβερνώμενοι in d8 alludes.
" Which Plato accents strongly by using the word δούλος, without meaning, of course, that
the producers in the Republic are to be the slaves of the philosophers (cf. 'Slavery in Plato's
Thought’, 292 and n. 25).
“ Cf. 'Justice and Happiness in the Republic, sects, it and in.
146 GREGORY VLASTOS

job. He can claim no benefit for himself except in so far as it would enable
him to be a better producer.37 This principle, upheld in the name of
δικαιοσύνη, dovetails into a conception of φιλία according to which one is
loved so far, and only so far, as he produces good. And here the question
we raised a moment ago in the Lysis—‘produces good for whom?’—
answers itself: good for the whole community, which plays no favourites,
distributing the social product to its producers with scrupulous impartial-
ity, taking from each according to his ability and giving to each according
to the needs of his job.
This moral philosophy Sir Karl Popper has called ‘collectivist or politi-
cal utilitarianism’. ‘Plato’, he writes,‘recognizes only one ultimate standard
[of justice], the interest of the state ... Morality is nothing but political
hygiene' (his italics).38 But for Plato, as for Socrates before him, the
supreme goal of all human endeavour is the improvement of the soul—
and that means its moral improvement.39 So the interest of the state would
count for nothing unless it were strictly subordinate to this end.'10 The
excellence of a state, its very legitimacy, would be judged by that standard:
The sum and substance of our agreement comes to this: By what means can the
members of our community come to be good men, having the goodness of soul that
is proper to men? ... This is the end to whose attainment all serious effort must be
directed throughout life. Nothing which could hamper this should be given prefer-
ence. In the end one should rather overturn the state, or else flee from it into exile,
rather than consent to submit to the servile yoke of baser men—one should endure
any fate rather than suffer the state to change to a polity which breeds baser human
beings. (770c-e)41
” Thus the Guardians are denied individual property rights because they would be 'more
excellent craftsmen at their own job’ (42lcl—2) without, than with, such rights. Cf. ‘Justice and
Happiness in the Republic’, in. 2.
* The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th edn., vol. i (Princeton, 1963), 107 (and cf. 119). There
have been many replies to this indictment. But it is not easy to rebut its thesis without endors-
ing antitheses which are still further from the truth. Thus R. B. Levinson (/« Defense of Plato
(Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 517) caps his critique (much of it pertinent) by calling on us to
‘recognize Plato’s altruistic concern for the welfare of the individual’; we are to see in ‘every
Platonic dialogue ... a monument erected to his belief that individual men are important'.
w
Lg. 707d: ‘unlike the majority of mankind, we do not regard mere safety and survival as
matters of greatest value, but rather that men may become and be as virtuous as possible as
long as they do survive’.
And 705e-706a: ‘For I lay it down that only that law is rightly enacted which aims, like an
archer, at this and this alone; how beauty (ro καλόν) should come about in consequence of it,
passing over every other consideration, be it wealth or anything else devoid of beauty and
virtue.’
40
Lg. 630b-c: ‘every legislator worth his salt will legislate with no other end in view than to
secure the greatest virtue [of the citizens]’.
41
And see the preamble to the laws in the opening paragraphs of Lg. 5, where the rationale
of the legislation is explained. (Here and in the preceding notes I have drawn on the Laws
where much that is implicit in the tightly constructed argument of the Republic is spelled out
at length.)
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 147

To be true to what Plato says so explicitly here and assumes throughout

the Republic, one would have to say not that morality is political hygiene
but that politics is moral hygiene. Yet even so what Popper says is not
entirely without foundation. One feels intuitively that something is amiss
in Plato’s ultramoralistic polity. But just what? The present analysis sug-
gests an alternative diagnosis:
Consider what would happen in this utopia if someone through no fault
of his own were to cease being a public asset. One of the philosophers, let
us say, becomes permanently disabled and can no longer do his job or any
other work that would come anywhere near the expected level of pro-
ductive excellence. And to plug a possible hole in the hypothesis, let up
preclude any higher spin-offs from the misfortune. It is not the case, for
instance, that the man’s character has been so purified during his illness
that those who now come to visit him leave his bedside morally braced
and elevated: that would be tantamount to shifting him to another job, the
propagation of virtue. Our hypothesis is that neither in this nor in any other
way can this man recoup his place as a producer. What may he then claim,
now that he may no longer ground his claims on the needs of his job, but
only on the value of his individual existence? As I read the Republic, the
answer is: Nothing. In book 3 Asclepius is pictured as follows:
He would rid them of their disorders by drugs or by the knife and tell them to go
on living as usual, so as not to impair their civic usefulness (ΐνα μη τά πολιτικά
βλάπτοι). But where the body was diseased through and through he would not try,
by diet and by finely graduated evacuations and infusions, to prolong a miserable
existence.... Treatment, he thought, would be wasted on a man who could not live
in his ordinary round of duties and was thus useless to himself and to the polis.
(407d-e; trans. after Cornford)
What are we to say? That this ‘political Asclepius’ (497e) is not the divin-
ity we know from other sources, the culture hero of a vocation pledged to
‘love of mankind’ (φιλανθρωπία)?42 This would be true. But it would miss
the point that Plato could say exactly what he did and still credit his recon-
ditioned Asclepius with φιλανθρωπία. If men are to be loved for their pro-
ductiveness and for no other reason, why should there be breach of love
in the refusal of medical treatment to the unproductive?
For another sidelight on what is morally disquieting about φιλία in the
Republic, consider what would happen to the individual’s freedom in that
utopia. We know how highly this was prized in Plato’s Athens. We know
the current estimate of the positive side of freedom: guaranteed partici-
pation in the process by which political decisions were reached. ‘There is
42
Hippocrates, Precepts (παραγγελίαι), 6: ‘for if there is φιλανβρωπίη, there is bound to be
φιλοτεχνίη.
148 GREGORY VLASTOS

no better way to define the proper sense of “citizen” says Aristotle, ‘than
in terms of having a share in judgement and office.’43 He holds that to deny
a man such a share would be to treat him as though he were no better than
an alien or a slave.44 And we know how highly the negative side of
freedom—the right to protected privacy—was esteemed. In Thucydides
Pericles boasts that daily life in Athens is free from censorious constraint, 4'’
and Nicias, calling on his commanders to do their utmost for Athens in her
hour of supreme peril,‘reminded them that their fatherland was the freest
in the world and that in it everyone had the right to live his daily life
without orders from anyone’.46 What would be left of all this in the Repub-
lic? Participatory democracy vanishes without a trace. So does free speech
and, what Plato realizes is at least as important, free song, free dance, free
art.47 The rulers lose all right to personal privacy. Even their sex life belongs
to the state. For the greater part of their adult years intercourse is per-
mitted them only for purposes of eugenic breeding, with partners assigned

“ Pol. 1275n22-3. πολίτης ό' απλώς ούόενϊ τών άλλ,ων ορίζεται μάλλον ή τφ μετέχειν κρίοεως καί
αρχής. By κρίσις Aristolle must mean here effective judgment in political and legislative, no less
than judicial, decisions (cf. Thucydides 2.40.2, ήτοι κρίνομέν γε ή έν&νμούμεϋα, where the latter
‘must here be used of those who originate proposals’, the former of those who judge (i.e. vote
for or against) them (A. W. Gomme, Historical Commentary on Thucydides, Book I (Oxford,
1956), ad loc.); also κριταί, 3. 37.4, and κρϊναι in 6.39.1). Aristotle goes on to explain (23-31)
that under άρχή he includes that of the juror and of the ecclesiast, no less than that of the mag-
istrate and of a member of the council. Cf. 1275h18-20 (much the same in 1278;,35-6. where
‘«trrx[ffp] των τιμών' = ‘sharing in αρχή' here).
" Pol. 1275*7-8.
έλεν&ερως δε [1] τά τε ηρός τον κοινόν ηολιτεύομεν και [2] ές την ηρός άλλήλυυς τών κα\Τ
ημέραν έηιτηδενμάτων νηοψίαν, ον δι' οργής τον πέλας, ει καΰ' ηδονήν τι 0pq, έχοντες, ουδέ
άζημίυνς μέν, λνιοιρίις δε τή νψει άχ&ηόόνας ηρυοτιΰέμενυι. άνεηαγβώς δε τά idta ηροσομιλοϋντις
... (2.37.2-3). The sense of νηοψίαν in this context I take to be ‘censorious watchfulness’ (LSJ.
s.v., η), λντοφύς τή όψει άγβηδόνας refers directly to ‘dirty looks’ at those who choose a differ-
ent style of life for themselves (Croiset, Plato’s Hippias Major, Charmides, Laches, and Lysis:
‘regards charges de blame’), indirectly to all those informal,extra-legal, pressures by which their
life could be made miserable, άνεηαχϋώς τά ίδια ηροσομιλονντες reinforces the notion of private
life free from oppressive intolerance. For the recognition of (1) and (2) as distinct, though com-
plementary. aspects of freedom, cf. Aristotle’s account of liberty as the ‘postulate’ (ύηόϋεσις) of
democracy: ‘one [kind] of freedom is to rule and be ruled in turn.... The other mark of democ-
racy is to live as one wishes (rt> ζην ώς βούλεται τις)’ (Pol. 1317b2—12).
Jft
Th. 7. 69. 2. Cf. Plato’s account of the democratic ethos in Rep. 557b: there men are ‘free
and the polis is full of freedom and free speech, and one has the liberty to do what he likes.
And where this liberty exists it is clear that each will make his own life according to his own
private design—that which pleases him.’ And cf. Aristotle in the preceding note.
47
The rulers must take the greatest care not to overlook the least infraction of the rule
against innovation in gymnastic and in music counter to the established order.... For a new
form of music is to be feared as endangering the whole [of the social order): for nowhere are
the modes of music altered without affecting the most fundamental political usages.... Here,
in music, our guardians it seems must build their guard-house’ (424b-c). Conceding that Homer
is ‘the first and most poetic of the tragic poets*, we must banish him from our state: ‘if you allow
the honeyed Muse in song or verse, pleasure and pain will be king in your polis instead of law
and consensus about the highest good’ (607a).
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 149

them by state officials. The end in view is the communizing—one might

almost say the homogenizing—of their value-preferences, their likes and
dislikes:
‘Can we say that anything would be a greater evil for a poiis then what breaks it up
and makes it many instead of one? Or any good greater than what binds it together
and makes it one?’
‘We can not.’
‘And is not the community of pleasure and of pain that binds it together—when
so far as possible all the citizens are pleased or pained alike on the same occasions
of gain or loss?’
‘Quite so.’
‘Whereas it is the privatization48 of these feelings that breaks the bond—when
some are intensely pained, while others are overjoyed at the very same things
befalling the poiis or its people?’
‘Yes indeed.’4’
Plato’s community is to approach the unity of affective experience in a
single person: When a man hurts his finger, we don’t say that his finger
feels the pain, but that he ‘feels the pain in his finger’; so too in ‘the best
ordered poiis ... when any citizen is affected for good or ill, this kind of
poiis will feel the affection as its own—all will share the pleasure
(συνησΰήσεται) or pain (ουλλυπήοεται)' (462d-e).
Now, that persons who love each other should respond sympathetically
to each other’s mishaps and triumphs, that each should rejoice when his
fellows have cause for joy and grieve when they have cause to grieve, is
only what we would expect. So from the fact that A and B are φίλοι we
may expect that A will be pleased at B's pleasure and pained at B’s pain.
But to say this is not to say that each will be himself pleased or pained at
those (and only those) things which please or pain the other.50 Let A

48
No such word exists in
English, as probably there
was none in Greek when
Plato wrote
ίδίωυις
49
here (no
462a9-cl. And other cf.
occurrence 739c-d:
Laws is listed in LSJ). the
Shorey and Robin of
implementation translate
the
‘individualiza-
maxim κοινά τά τώνφΟ,ωv
tion’, which is close
would
enough. ideally
require Cdrnford ‘driving
resortsout to
periphrasis:
by 50 every means
TTte ‘whenwhatsuch
notion is
that
feelings“private”
called
friends areare thoseno (ϊδιον)
wholonger out
share
universal’;
each
of life, sopleasures
other’s docs con-
and Lee:
and
‘When if feelings
triving,
pains differ
itis were possible,
accepted
between
that
by evenindividuals.’
Aristotle, things
but onlywhichwith
nature
the madewhich
proviso private should
expresses
somehow
what he himself considers become
common—thus eyes and
definitive of
φιλία:
ears and ‘Yourhandsφίλος would is behe
expected
who shares to yoursee and hear
pleasures
and what
at act isin good common,(τον
and men wouldτοις
σννηδόμενον be asάγαϋοϊς)
united
as they
and could
grief at what possibly be in
is painful
(ουναλγοϋντα
what they praise τοϊςand
λνπηροις)
blame,
rejoicing
for your sake, not for the
and grievingof at the some-
sake same
else’ (Rh. 138134-6).
things'.
thing
The all-important phrase
I have italicized is not
present in EN 1166J6-8:
‘And some (define
the φίλος] as one who
consorts with another and
shares his preferences (τόν
ουνδιάγοντα και
ταντά αίρονμενον), or as one
who shares the pains and
pleasures of the one he
loves (τόι»
150 GREGORY VLASTOS

admire and B dislike the mixolydian mode and Sappho’s lyrics. Then some
things in their world which thrill A will chill B. Would it follow that they
cannot be friends or lovers? Why should it? Why should not personal affec-
tion imply tolerance, even tender regard, for such differences? So it would,
if it did mean wishing another’s good for his own sake. For then A would
have good reason for wishing that B should have what B himself deems
material to the fulfilment of his own unique personality—pleased at the
thought of B’s having it, though A himself would only be pained if it were
forced on him. To work out a modus vivendi in which such differences are
respected might well involve practical difficulties. It would call for recip-
rocal adjustments and concessions. But these would be felt as implemen-
tations of mutal love, not as denials of it. This possibility does not occur to
Plato. He takes it for granted that diversity of valuational response—‘pri-
vatization’ of feelings—would be a disruption of the love bond,51 a sign of
mutual indifference or hostility. So the constraint on personal freedom at
its deepest level—the freedom to feel whatever it be one wants to feel,
whose suppression would justify that of so many other kinds of freedom—
becomes not only compatible with what Plato understands by φιλία, but
its indispensable ideal condition. He could not have reached this result if
he had thought of love as wishing another person’s good for just that
person’s sake, looking upon the loved one’s individual being as something
precious in and of itself.

IV

If—to recall the diction of the Lysis—we may not accord to any person we
love the status of πρώτον φίλον, whom, or what, may we ‘really’ and ‘truly’
love? The sections of the Republic 1 have so far discussed give no more of
an answer than does the passage about the πρώτον φίλον in the Lysis. Only
when we come to the treatise on metaphysics and epistemology, which

συναλγονντα και υυνηδόμενον τώ φίλφ)' But note that there is no indication here that this
formula would be acceptable to Aristotle as a definition of φιλία. The evidence of the Rhetoric
shows that it would not: of the two formulae in 1166*2-10 only the first (**2-5* quoted in n. 2
above) would be acceptable to Aristotle, since only this one states the condition which Aristo-
tle uses to define φίλος in Rh. 1380*35-1381*1 (quoted in η. 1 above), a context which leaves no
doubt that Aristotle is speaking in propria persona (cf. όριοάμενοι λέγωμεν here with οι όέ
(ζιΟέαοι) in ΕΝ 116636). That this remains the crucial condition of‘perfect’ φιλία in the Nico-
machean Ethics is clear, for example, at 1156l19-10, oi δε βουλόμενυι ταγαθά τοΐς φίλοις εκείνων
ενεκυ. μάλιστα φίλοι.
Μ
As breaking up (διαοκφ) the community, making it ‘many’ rather than ‘one’ (462a-b); the
same implication in Laws 739c-d, where the citation in n. 49 goes on to speak of laws which
maximize identity of pleasure and pain among the citizens as ‘making the polis one so far as
possible’ (739d3-4).
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE
15
1

starts with the introduction of the Theory of Ideas in the latter part of book
5, do we get at long last what we have been looking for. 52 We get it when
Plato starts talking of the philosophers as lovers of the Ideas.53 He uses for
this purpose not only φιλεΐν (479e, with άστζάζεσ&αι), but also εραν, which
is so much stronger.54 From just these data in the Republic we could have
inferred that now the πρώτον φίλον is the Idea. But we have also the Sym-
posium and the Phaedrus, either of which would confirm this inference to
the hilt. I shall be content to work with the former, and there only with
the metaphysical core of the dialogue—the part in which the priestess-
prophetess Diotima instructs Socrates in ‘the things of love’.55 She begins
with things Socrates says he knows already:
We love only what is beautiful.
In loving it we desire to possess it in perpetuity.
We desire to possess it because we think it good and expect that its possession
would make us happy.56
52
474c ff. Cf. ‘A Metaphysical Paradox’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philo-
sophical Association, 39 (1966), 5-16; and in Platomc Studies, 43 ff.
5
* 501d: the philosophers are the ‘lovers (έρασται), of being and truth’, i.e. of the Ideas: 490b:
the philosopher’s ερως for the Idea will lead him to amnion with it which will give birth *to intel-
ligence and truth’ (a passage which states in miniature the experience of the vision of the Idea
of Beauty and union with it in Smp. 210e-2l2a).
u
Cf. above, n. 4 (i).
ή δή καί έμε τά έρωτικά έδίδαξεν; 201d5. τά ερωτικά is used repeatedly throughout the dis-
course to refer to its theme.
56
204d-205a, 205e-206all, 207a2. Nygren (Eros and Agape, 180 η. 1) cites this passage to
prove the ‘egocentric’ and ‘acquisitive’ nature of Platonic eros, taking no account of the fact
that what Diotima has said so far is not meant to be the whole story: as yet she has not stated,
has scarcely hinted at, that distinctive feature of Platonic eros which she proceeds forthwith to
explain as ‘birth in beauty’ (to be discussed directly in the text above). For a corrective, see R.
A. Markus (‘The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium’, Downside Review,Ί3 (1955), 219-30):
Markus (pp. 225 ff.) calls attention to ‘the radical change of perspective' when ‘the new picture'
of love ‘as a begetting or procreating’ is introduced. However, Markus goes a bit too far in the
other direction when he remarks that while this new conception of love ‘is at first grafted onto
the original metaphor of desire-and-fulfilment, it very soon achieves independence’ (ibid.).
Diotima never cuts loose from the original description of eros as desire for one’s perpetual pos-
session of the good (εοτιν a pa συλλήβδην ό ερως τοϋ το αγαθόν αύτφ είναι άεί\ 206al 1-12); she
brings in ‘birth in beauty’ to fill out, not to amend, that description (see next note), even assert-
ing (206e8-207a2) that ‘birth in beauty’ follows (and ‘necessarily’!) from that agreed-upon
description. She claims that only through the immortalizing effect of ‘birth in beauty’ can one
fulfil the desire to possess the good in perpetuity; how seriously she takes this implication shows
up in her treatment of the Alcestis story: Alcestis’ readiness to give her life for that of Admetus,
which Phaedrus had explained as due to the intensity of her love for her husband (νττερεβάλετο
τή φιλίρ. διά τον έρωτα; I79c1), Diotima explains as due rather to her desire to win immortal
fame for herself (208c-d). (A further point that should not escape notice is the force of the pos-
sessive pronoun in the (above-cited) phrase in 206al 1-12 and in the parallel phrase (to be cited
in the next note) in 207a2. This is brought out well in Suzy Groden’s translation of the two
phrases: ‘love is for the good to always belong to oneself, ‘love is for the good to be eternally
one’s own’ (The Poems of Sappho (Indianapolis, 1966). It gets lost in the usual translations. Thus,
to render the first phrase ‘love is of the eternal possession of the good’ (so Jowett, and similar
renderings in Hamilton, Robin. Apelt, and Capelle) fails to make it clear that what the lover
desires is his possession of the good.)
152 GREGORY VLASTOS

Then she goes on to ask (206bl-3):

This being the aim of love/7 in what way and by what activity is it to be pursued if
the eagerness and intensity of the pursuit is to be (properly) called ‘love’?
Socrates has no idea of what she is driving at.58 She tells him: ‘Birth in
beauty’ (τόκος εν τω καλφ). She explains:
We are all pregnant*9 in body and in spirit, and when we reach maturity our nature
longs to give birth. But this we can do only in the presence of beauty, never in that
of ugliness.60 There is something divine about this. In pregnancy and in birth the
mortal becomes immortal. (206c)
Beauty stirs us so deeply, Plato is saying, because we have the power to
create and only the beauty we love can release that power. He puts this,
to begin with, into his interpretation of physical, heterosexual, love. Being
himself an invert, with little appreciation of passionate love between the
sexes for purposes other than procreation,61 all he sees in feminine beauty
is the lure to paternity. He accepts this as an authentic, if low-grade, form
of creativity. Then, turning to other ranges of experience, he holds that
what we love in each of them is always some variety of beauty which
releases in us the corresponding power of ‘birth in beauty’. Living in a
culture which accepts the pederast62 and does not constrain him, as ours
'7 Following Bury (against Burnet, Robin, and others) 1 accept Bast's emendation (favoured
by Hermann and Schanz among others) of τούτο of the codices to τούτου, since the sense makes
it clear that the reference of the pronoun in όιωκόντων αυτό is not ερως itself, but its aim (love
is the pursuing—not the object of the pursuit, which is the eternal possession of the good); and
cf. 207a2, εϊπερ τού άγαΰοΰ έαντω είναι άει ερως έστίν, where the object of έστίν is quite explic-
itly the aim of ερως, not ερως itself.
5S
He replies, ‘If I could [tell you the answer], Diotima, i should not be marvelling at your
wisdom and coming to you to learn of this very matter.’ This suggests that Plato is now intro-
ducing a doctrine which cannot be credited to the historical Socrates (cf. his use of a similar
device in Meno 81a: Socrates learns of the doctrine of transmigration from 'priests and priest-
esses’). I see no justification for the view (F. M. Cornford,‘The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Sym-
posium'. in The Unwritten Philosophy (Cambridge, 1950), 75) that ‘the limit reached by the
philosophy’ of Socrates is indicated no earlier than in 209e4. if Plato had wanted to imply such
a thing why should he have represented Socrates as stumped already at 206b?
5V
ηάντες κυοϋσιν άνθρωποι. For this striking image of male pregnancy there is no known
precedent in Greek literature. The nearest thing to it is in Apollo’s argument in the Eumeniiles
(661 ff.) that the father is the true progenitor {τοκεύς), the mother serving only as ‘nurse of the
new-sown pregnancy (τροφός... κύματος veoajcopov)'—a kind of human incubator.
0,1
Excising ή γάρ άνόρύς mi γυναικός συνουσία as a gloss: cf. Bury, ad loc.. I find the defence
of the text in $. Rosen. Plato's Symposium (New Haven, 1968), 247 η. 125, incomprehensible: ‘it
has the obvious function of serving as transition from homosexual to heterosexual generation’—
how so, when there has been absolutely no reference to homosexual generation at all?
61
At least in the middle dialogues. There is a passage in the Laws (839a-b) which suggests
a belter appreciation of conjugal love: one of his reasons there for prohibiting every other form
of sexual gratification is that the restriction would make men fonder of their own wives (γυναιξί
τε εαυτών οικείους είναι και φί/,ους). Cf. G. Grube, Plato’s Thought (London. 1935), 118-19.
b
- On this, see K. J. Dover, 'Eros and Nomos’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. 1 ί
(1966). 31-42, and Appendix II. [Editor's note: For Appendix, see Platonic Studies, 38-42 ]
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE
15
3

did Proust, to falsify the imaginative transcript of his personal experience,

transvesting Alfred into Albertine, Plato discovers a new form of ped-
erastic love,63 fully sensual in its resonance,64 but denying itself con-
summation,65 transmuting physical excitement into imaginative and
intellectual energy. At the next level, higher in value and still more ener-
gizing, he puts the love of mind for mind, expecting it to prove so much
more intense than skin-love that mere physical beauty will now strike the
lover as a ‘small’, contemptible, thing.66 Still higher in ordered succession
come the beauty of poetry, of political constitutions, of science, and of phi-
losophy. Ascending relentlessly, the lover will come to see at last ‘a mar-
vellous sort of Beauty’ (210e)—the Platonic Idea of Beauty. ‘And all our
previous labours’, says Diotima, ‘were for this.’67 All previously encoun-
tered objects—bodies, minds, institutions, works of the imagination or of
science—were loved as a means of moving closer step by step to this ‘mar-
vellous sort of Beauty’.
Here we find ourselves in the thick of Plato’s ontology, so let us stop
to get our bearings. For every generic character which spatio-temporal
objects may have in common, Plato posits an ideal entity in which partic-
ular things ‘participate’ so long as they have that character. We are thus
offered a tripartite ontology:

“ 1 say ‘new’ because the doctrine οώφρων ερως (in which, it has been claimed, Euripides
anticipates Plato’ (Helen North, Sophrosyne (Ithaca, 1966), 73 [let passim), is a doctrine of self-
control. not of abstinence. The Uranian Aphrodite of Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium is
not meant to rule out intercourse, but to restrict it to a context in which intellectual and spiri-
tual values prevail. Cf. Dover: ‘But both good and bad (eros in Pausanias’ speech] aim at the
physical submission of the boy.... the difference ... lies in the whole context of the ultimate
physical act, not in the presence or absence of the act itself (‘Eros and Nomos’, 34).
w
See Appendix II. [Editor’s note: See Platonic Studies, 38-42.]
65
This is not said in the Symposium (cf. Grube, Plato's Thought, 103-4) but it is suggested in
the rebuff to Alcibiadcs’ all-out attempt at seduction in 219b-d. It is unambiguously clear in
Phdr. 250e and 255e-256e, as well as in Rep. 403b-c. The latter is not contradicted by μηδέν}
εξεΐναι άηαρνη&ήναι ον άν βούληται φιλεΐν as a prize for military prowess in 468b-c. The assump-
tion that here Plato is ‘allowing sexual license, a completely free pick of sexual partners’ to val-
orous athletes (Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory
(New York, 1965), 335) is based on a misreading of the text: φιλεΐν does not mean ‘intercourse’
in this context (or in any other in Greek prose, to my knowledge)—for that Plato would have
used υυγγίγνεσθαι (as in 329c2, c4, 360c 1, 459d8, 560b5); φιλεΐν and απτεοϋαι are specifically
allowed to chaste lovers in 403b-c, where intercourse is clearly ruled out, as also in Phdr. 255e,
where απτεοϋαι, φιλεΐν, and even σνγκατακεΐσϋαι are proper and will stop short of intercourse
in the case of the ‘victorious’ lovers (256a-b). (It should be noted that this interpretation of
468b-c is entirely consistent with ‘opportunity of more frequent intercourse with women’ (460b)
as an incentive to military prowess: this has to do not with φιλεΐν but with eugenic breeding (ώς
πλεΐοτοι τών παίδων έκτων τοιυντων στκίρωνται).)
66
τδ περί το σώμα κάλλος σμικρόν π ήγήσεται είναι; 210c (a remarkable thing to say, consid-
ering the extreme susceptibility to physical beauty revealed in a passage like Phdr. 250c-e); and
cf. κατεφρόνησεν και κατεγέλασεν τής έμής ώρας in Symp. 219c4.
210e; cf. also 210al and211c2.
154 GREGORY VLASTOS

1. the transcendent, paradigmatic form: say, the Form of Justice:

2. the things in our experience which may have or lack the corres-
ponding character—the persons, laws, practices, states, which may or
may not be just:
3. the character of those things—the justice they instantiate if they are
just.6S
That (1) is radically distinct (or. as Aristotle was to put it. 'exists separ-
ately'61’) from (3) 1 take to be the crux of this ontology. But what exactly
does this‘separation' mean? Plato never made this fully clear. Had he done
so. he would surely have seen how treacherous is one of the ways in which
he tends to represent it in his middle dialogues, thinking of the Form as
differing from its empirical instances not only catcgorially—as incorporeal,
eternal, intelligibles would differ from corporeal, temporal, sensibles—but
also as would an ideal exemplar from imperfect ‘resemblances' of it.'"This
kind of language, if meant literally, would burden the Platonic Form with
the logical difficulties of ’self-predication'71—an assumption which could
not be generalized without contradiction, for then, for example, the Form
Plurality would have to be plural, and the Form Motion would have to
be moving, contrary to the stipulation that each Form is unitary and
immutable. Did Plato ever walk into this trap? The question has been hotly
debated, and this essay is not the place to pursue the controversy. All 1
need say here is this: If Plato's ontology had been fashioned for narrowly
logical semantic, and epistemological, purposes, he would have had no use
whatever for exemplarism and we would have to read the language which
suggests it as pure metaphor, freeing it from any self-predicative commit-
ment. Suppose that just this had been Plato's intention. What would have
been the consequence? A more coherent ontology, certainly—but a less
fruitful one for other uses to which Plato put his Ideas, for his theory of
love most of all. If Plato had seen in the Idea of Beauty iust the character,
not the paradigmatic instance of the character, then it would not have been
for him the absolutely72 and divinely7' beautiful object of Diolima's dis-
<S
'' Cl. Reasons and Causes', in Plutonic Studies. 76 IT.
Cf. Xletuph. I()3t>'25 if., and the references m Bonn/. Index Aristondiats. Prussian Acadeim
edn. of Aristotle, v (Berlin. 1870). 860a35-S.
’’ For sensible instances 'resembling' their Form ‘defectively*, see Phd. 74c 1-4. tvdii <)> KUI
or dvvurut rotovrov (ivut oiov iktivo. «/./.* i:onv r/ uv/.dri pov . .. npoorotKtvut ttiv. t I’drrorrpoj- di
i'yav. Cf. also: we cannot expect the just man. nuvrayj) rotovrov tivut oiov >) diKuioovvif (Pep.
472b): we must believe that the visible movements of the heavens, rwi’ dhp'hvtov ivdiiv
(Rep. 529d); and that the physical bed is not the Teal' Bed. d/./.d r< rotovrov oun■ rd dv and
attrdpdv rt itpdz d/.tp'htav (Rep. 597a).
!
The assumption that the Form corresponding to a given character has that character: cf.
*Thc Unity of the Virtues in the Protagoras'. in Platonic Studies. 22i-69 n. 97.
:
Smp. 21 la 1-5. * Snip. 21 !e3. avrd rd Ihiov Ka/.dv.
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE
15
5

course; it would not even have been beautiful—no more beautiful than
ugly, as the character Whiteness, being an abstract universal, a purely
logical entity, is itself neither white nor of any other colour. How then could
it have been love object par excellence in a theory which so strictly condi-
tions love on beauty? What inspired that theory was a paradigm form so
splendidly and shamelessly self-exemplifying that its own beauty outshines
that of everything else.
I cannot here formulate, let alone try to answer, the many questions that
spring to mind when one ponders this theory that has done so much to
mould the European imagination from Plotinus to Dante and from
Petrarch to Baudelaire. A proper study of it would have to take account
of at least three things about its creator: he was a homosexual."1 a mystic,
and a moralist. So to reach a balanced understanding of Platonic love—of
the true original, not of that caricature confused with it by the illiterate
and not infrequently by literati—one would need to pursue at the very
least three complementary investigations:
First, a clinical study of the effect which Plato's inversion would be
likely to have on one who saw anal intercourse as ‘contrary to nature', 7'' a
degradation not only of man's humanity, but even of his animality: even
to brutes. Plato believes, nature’ ordains heterosexual coupling. '’ This
The evidence tells strongly against classifying Plato as a bisexual (as. for example, in R. B.
Levinson. In Defense of Plato (Cambridge. Mass.. 1953). 118 11. 109 Plato ... like others of the
bisexually inclined Athenians'). In every passage I can recall which depicts or alludes to the
power of sexual desire the context is homosexual. For some examples, sec D. F. Ast. Lexicon
Platonicnm (1st edn. 1835: repr. Berlin. I908).s.v. παιδικά (to which Rep. 474d-e and 485c should
be added): also Snip. 21ld.and Phdr. 250d ff. And cf. Appendix II. [Editor's note: For the appen-
dix. see Platonic Studies. 38-42.]
,s
Phdr. 251a I: Lg. 636-7. And see next note.
Lg. 636b4-6. και ό») teat παλαιόν νόμιμον δοκή το έπι τήδτνμα roe κατά qvotv to pi τά
nqpobiotu ήόονάς ον μόνον άνϋρυ>πυη·, άλλα mi θηρίων, do t/ ΰαρκιναι (England’s text, defended
by him ad loc.): And then again this ancient usage is thought to have corrupted the pleasure of
sex which is natural not only for men but even for brutes.' Lg. 836b8-c6.'If one were to follow
nature in enacting the usage (observed) before Laius. stating that it was right to refrain from
the same intercourse with men and boys as with women, calling to witness the nature of wild
beasts and pointing out that male has no (such) contact with male, since it is contrary to nature.'
(I agree with G. J. de Vries (A Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato (Amsterdam. 1969). 153)
that Dover's explanation of contrary to nature* here by against the rules' will not do: some-
thing far stronger is intended.) The same indictment of παρά <fvmv ηδονή occurs in Phdr.
250e-25la. where the sight of the beautiful boy incites the depraved lover to homosexual inter-
course. The point of this passage has been blunted by mistranslation, lltus Hackforth lakes
Τί τράπυάος νόμον βαΐνειν επιχειρεί και παιόοοπορεϊν to mean 'essays to go after the fashion of a
four-footed beast, and to beget offspring of the fiesh' (the same misconstruction of the sense in
every translator and commentator I have consulted): hence Plato is thought to be making here
a contcmputous reference to heterosexual love' (R. Hackforth. Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge.
1952). 98). which would be sharply at variance with the whole notion of'birth in beauty* in the
Symposium. But patent· here is *to mount' (cf. de Vries ad loc.: he refers to LSJ. s.v. Λ. Π. 1). As
for παώοοπορεϊν. this means only ‘to sow generative seed' (what is 'contrary to nature' is pre-
cisely that this'sowing' cannot generate: cf. Lg. S4 \64-5. orn tprtv... άγονα άρρι νων παρ<\ (fvoiv)·.
156 GREGORY VLASTOS

thought would poison for him sensual gratification with anticipatory

torment and retrospective guilt. It would tend to distort his overall view
of sexual fulfilment, while leaving him with raw sensitiveness to male
beauty and heightening his capacity for substitute forms of erotic response.
Second, a study which would connect his theory of love with his reli-
gious mysticism, exploring the implications of the momentous fact that
while Plato retains traditional deities and sets high above them in the
Timaeus a creator-god of his own devising, none of these personal divini-
ties stirs either awe or love in his heart, while the severely impersonal Ideas
evoke both, but especially love, so much so that he speaks repeatedly of
communion with them as an act of blissful and fertile conjugal union. 77
Third, a study of the place of love in the pattern of interpersonal rela-
tions recommended in his moral philosophy.
Realizing what folly it would have been to spread myself in a single essay
all over these three areas, I chose to concentrate on the third. That is why
I started off with Aristotle, and then approached the Symposium via the
Lysis and the Republic. My reason may be now apparent: what needs to
be stressed most of all in this area is that Plato’s theory is not, and is not
meant to be, about personal love for persons—i.e. about the kind of love
we can have only for persons and cannot have for things or abstractions.
What it is really about is love for place-holders of the predicates ‘useful’
and ‘beautiful’—of the former when it is only φιλία, of the latter, when it
is ερως. In this theory persons evoke ερως if they have beautiful bodies,
minds, or dispositions. But so do quite impersonal objects—social or polit-
ical programmes, literary compositions, scientific theories, philosophical
systems, and, best of all, the Idea of Beauty itself. As objects of Platonic
love all these are not only as good as persons, but distinctly better.
Plato signifies their superiority by placing them in the higher reaches of
that escalated figure that marks the lover’s progress, relegating love of
persons to its lower levels. Even those two personal attachments which
seem to have meant more to him than did any others in his whole life—
his love for Socrates in his youth and, later on, for Dion of Syracuse78—
and the way of the four-footed brute’ alludes to the posture in anal intercourse (so portrayed
in pottery: see e.g. Jean Marcadé, Eros Kalos (Geneva, 1962), pil. 136 and 147). The context is
purely homosexual, and the passage was so read in antiquity: Plutarch, Amat. 751d-e, leaves no
doubt on this point.
77
For the references, see n. 53 above, sub fin.: and cf. ‘A Metaphysical Paradox', Platonic
Studies, 50-1.
7K
On the latter, see P. Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, 1933), 45.1 see no good reason to
doubt the authenticity of the epigram on Dion’s death apud Diogenes Laertius 3. 30 (accepted
by Shorey and by U. van Wilamowitz-Mollendorff (Platon (Berlin, 1948), 509); defended by C.
M. Bowra, American Journal of Philology. 59 (1936), 393-404) whose terminal line is ώ έμον
έκμήνας ϋνμόν ερωτι Διών (cf. εφήνας here with the definition of love as μανία in the Phdr.
265a-266a et passim; cf. n. 80 below).
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 157

would be less than halfway up to the summit in that diagram. This is what
we must keep in view, if we are to reach a fair assessment of Plato’s con-
ception of love, acknowledging its durable achievement no less than its
residual failure.

Let me speak first of the achievement. Plato is the first Western man to
realize how intense and passionate may be our attachment to objects as
abstract as social reform, poetry, art, the sciences, and philosophy—an
attachment that has more in common with erotic fixation than one would
have suspected on a pre-Freudian view of man. So far as we know no
earlier Greek had sensed this fact, though language had pointed the way
to it by sanctioning as a matter of course the use of εράν, no less than φίλεΓν,
for something as impersonal as love of country.79 It is left to Plato to gen-
eralize this kind of ερως and to see that it may reach a mad 80 obsessive
intensity which is commonly thought peculiar to sexual love. He discerns,
as the link between such disparate involvements, the sense of beauty. He
understands how decisive a role in the motivation of the most abstruse
inquiry may be played by such things as the elegance of a deduction, the
neatness of an argument, or the delight which floods the mind when a pow-
erful generality brings sudden luminous order to a mass of jumbled data.
He sees that the aesthetic quality of such purely intellectual objects is akin
to the power of physical beauty to excite and to enchant even when it holds
out no prospect of possession. And, instead of undertaking, as did Freud,
to explain the attractiveness of beauty in all of its diverse manifestations
as due to the excitation of lust, open or disguised, Plato invokes another
drive, the hunger to create, and argues that this is what we all seek to
appease in every activity propelled by beauty. That Plato’s explanation is
” Cf. Aristophanes, Birds 1316, κατέχουσι ό' έρωτες εμάς πόλεως. Thucydides 2. 43. 1, έραοτάς
γιγνομένους αυτής (sc. τής πόλεως), with Gomme’s comment ad loc.
80
Had I been able to work more intensively on the Phaedrus in this essay I would have taken
a crack at the extraordinary fact that here έρως is not only described, but defined, as μανία by
our ultra-rationalist, Plato, and is associated as μανία in the closest terms with philosophy no
less than with the mystic cults (which had been done also, though only in passing, in Smp. 218b,
τής φιλοσόφου μανίας τε καί βακχείας (of Socrates)). This convergence of μανία and νους in love
does not seem to intrigue commentators. Few of them notice the paradox at ail or, if they do.
they seem bent on explaining it away (thus J. Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness, trans. R.
and C. Winston (New York, 1964), 49 ff.) gives μανία in the Phaedrus a theological twist which
hardly does justice to its psychological meaning; and even qua theology it is too one-sided:
Pieper objects to ‘madness’ as the sense of μανία because that ‘suggests ties with the orgiastic
Dionysian rites’). But even the above citation from the Symposium (not to refer to further evi-
dence, which exists in abundance) would show that those ‘orgiastic Dionysian rites’ could not
have been entirely uncongenial to Plato.
158 GREGORY VLASTOS

one-sided does not damn it. So is Freud's. Where comprehensive insight is

denied us. even partial glimpses of (he truth are precious.
But, second, to return to Plato’s view of that kind of love whose imme-
diate object is a man or a woman, we can get out of it a subordinate thesis
which has not only psychological but also moral validity. When he speaks
of epiog for a person for the sake of the Idea, we can give a good sense to
this at first sight puzzling notion, a sense in which it is true. It is a fact that
much erotic attachment, perhaps most of it, is not directed to an individual
in the proper sense of the word—to the integral and irreplaceable existent
that bears that person's name—but to a complex of qualities, answering to
the lover's sense of beauty, which he locales for a time truly or falsely in
that person. I say ‘truly or falsely’ to call attention to a feature of Platonic
love which has never been noticed, to m.y knowledge, in the rich literature
on this subject. This feature can best be appreciated by contrast with
romantic love—at any rate, with that brand of it whose textbook example
is Rousseau.
'There is no real love without enthusiasm.’ he writes in the Emile, ‘and
no enthusiasm without an object of perfection, real or chimerical, but
always existing in the imagination'.81 So if we do want ‘real love", we must
buy it with illusion. We must transfigure imaginatively the necessarily
imperfect persons in whom we vest our love. We see in the Confessions
that this is the recipe Rousseau followed himself in what he calls there 'the
first and only love of my life, whose consequences were to make it unfor-
gettable for the rest of my life and terrible in my recollection'. 82 What
excited that high-temperature passion was scarcely the plain8’ and unre-
markable young woman Madame d’Houdetot. She served him only as a
mannequin to wear his fantasies. A mood of frustration and self-pity had
settled on him in his middle forties and had thrown him back, so he tells
us,’into the land of chimeras':84 ‘Finding nothing in existence worthy of my
delirium. I nourished it in an ideal world which my creative imagination
soon peopled with beings after my own heart.... Forgetting completely

M
(Euvres completes, iv. Pleiade edn. (Paris, 1969). 743. He goes on. a little later: 'Not ail is
illusion in love. 1 admit. But what is real consists of the sentiments with which it animates us
for the true beauty it makes us love. This beauty is not in the object we love, it is the work of
our errors. Well, what difference does that make? Would we be less willing to sacrifice all those
base sentiments to this imaginary model?' For more statements, some of them quite remark-
able. to the same effect elsewhere in Rousseau, see M. liigcklinger. Jean Jactptes Rousseau et la
teallte tie iunag'utalre (Ncuchatel. 1962). ch. 4: 'l.'Amour et le pays des chimeres'.
's: Qiuvres completes, i. Plciadc edn. (Paris. 1959), 4.39. The references in the next five notes
are to this volume.
M
Mad' la Comtesse de Houdetot... n'eloit point belle. Son visage ¿toil marque dc la petite
verole. son teint manquoil dc finesse.' etc. p. 439). Compare Zulietta (pp. 318-20).
M
p. 427. Erotic fantasy had been a habit of his since adolescence (p. 41).
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE
15
9

the human race, 1 made for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heav-
enly in their virtues as in their beauties’.8·1 Presently Madame d’Houdetot
moved into his private landscape. He had been ‘intoxicated with a love
without an object’. She provided one. ‘Before long I had no eye for anyone
but Madame d'Houdetot.but reclothed with all the perfections with which
I had come to adorn the idol of my heart.’8'’
It would be a blunder to call this affair ‘Platonic love’, which it in fact
was in the vulgar sense of the term—technically there was no infidelity87—
and which it also approached as love for an ideal object. But no Platonist
could have confused the idol of his heart with a Madame d’Houdetot. Even
in the heat of passion the Platonic Idea does not lend itself to this kind of
mistake. We sec in the Phaedrus what keeps Plato’s head clear even when
his senses are inflamed.88 It is the ontology of the paradigm form. That
harshly dualistic transcendentalism, which enraged Aristotle by its ‘sepa-
ration’ of Forms from things and which nowadays drives analytical philoso-
phers to despair when they try to make logical sense out of it, proves a
sterling asset in this area. It sustains a kind of idealism less addicted to the
pathetic fallacy than are most other kinds. It makes for a more truthful
vision of that part of the world which we are all most tempted to idealize
and so to falsify—the part we love. And it makes for a gain of another, no
less important, kind: freedom from the tyranny which even the unidealized
love object can exercise over a lover. Swann did not long idealize Odette. 8''

* p. 439. w p. 440.
s
’ i.e. no genital
intercourse. That there was
physical contact of other
sorts in abundance is
slated openly enough in the
Confessions (pp. 443-5; and
see also the passages from
the** Not that the lover corre-
in
spondence
the Phaedrusin H. Guillemin
is less
* **s study Unthe
combustible: homme, deux
exaltation
ombres
of the(Geneva.
erotic1943). ch.
object
iv:
depicted here Fausse
outruns
Route*) But
anything there
in the is plenty
Confessions
or. to slick
of this to Plato’s
in Platonic love own
too:
cf. n. 65 above. Rousseau
culture, anything
says
in the whole of Greek prose that
‘though
and almost at the
timeswholecarried
of
away by my
surviving sensesverse
Greek I soughtas
to makeit her isunfaithful.
well; matchedI
neverin Sappho (with whom
only really
desired this*
Plato openly(p. 444): the
invites
lover depicted235c3:
comparison, in Phdr. cf.254a
W.
ff. would not be human
Fortcnbaugh. or
Plato
truthful
Phaedrus, 235c3\if Classical he
did not say61
Philology. the(1966),
same mutatis
108-9:
mutandis.
108): '(when he encounters
the youth],
first there comes upon him a
shuddering and a measure of
that awe which the
(transcendental]
vision had once inspired,
then reverence as at the sight
of a god: did he not fear
being taken for
a madman he would offer
sacrifice to his boy-love as
to a holy image and a god ..
.* (25!a2-7;
the translation mainly after
Hackforth s).
Even so. the lover is in no
danger of confusing the boy
with the Idea or of decking
him out
with pseudo-attributes. In
160 GREGORY VLASTOS

But his love for her made a tortured, degraded slave out of him while it
lasted, and disabled his spirit for the rest of his life. If there is any place at
all in Plato’s diagram for a creature like Odette, it would be at just one level
short of the bottom. At the next higher level Swann would have been once
again free and whole.
But a sterling asset may be bought at a heavy cost. Plato’s theory floods
with the most brilliant light a narrow sector of its theme, and there points
the way to authentic spiritual achievement. Beyond those limits the vision
fails. Plato is scarcely aware of kindness, tenderness, compassion, concern
for the freedom, respect for the integrity of the beloved, as essential ingre-
dients of the highest type of interpersonal love. Not that Platonic eros
is as ‘egocentric’ and ‘acquisitive’ as Nygren has claimed;’'0 it is only too
patently Ideocentric and creative. But while it gives no more quarter to
self-indulgence than would Pauline agape or Kantian good will, neither
does it repudiate the spiritualized egocentricism of Socratic philia.9I That
first description of the aim of eros in Diotima’s speech—‘that one should
possess beauty for ever’—is never amended in the sequel in any way which
would make egoistic eros a contradiction or even an anomaly. 93 It is not
said or implied or so much as hinted at that ‘birth in beauty’ should be
motivated by love of persons—that the ultimate purpose of the creative
act should be to enrich the lives of persons who are themselves worthy
of love for their own sake. The preceding analysis shows that Diotima’s
failure to say or to suggest anything of the kind is no accidental oversight,
but an integral feature of the structure of Plato’s theory.
As a theory of the love of persons, this is its crux: what we are to love
in persons is the ‘image’91 of the Idea in them.94 We are to love the persons
so far, and only in so far, as they are good and beautiful. Now since all too

9,1
Cf. n. 56 above.
v!
Cf. Seel. II above and note that in the last analysis Socrates has just one reason for moral
conduct: the perfection of his soul. In the Criio his final reason for refraining from an unjust act
(breaking gaol) is that to commit injustice would corrupt his sou! (47c-48d). Cf. the argument
against Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias: against Poius he argues that one should abstain from
wrongdoing because this would make one’s own soul evil; also that when one has done wrong,
one should welcome punishment which purges the evil in the soul, because the man with
unpurged evil has suffered the greatest possible harm and is most wretched of men (477a-478e).
Similarly he argues against Callicles that ‘wrongdoing is the greatest of evils to the wrongdoer’
(50%) because it ruins his soul and, with one's soul ruined, one would be better off dead than
alive (5 i !e—512b). Plato never repudiates this motivation for moral conduct. He supports it to
the hilt in the great argument that ‘justice pays’ in the Republic.
v
- Cf. n. 56 above.
This is most explicit in the Phaedrus (250el ff ), but also clear enough, by implication, in
the Symposium also. This is all love for a person could be. given the status of persons in Plato's
ontology.
M
Sect. IV above, the terminal paragraph.
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE 161

few human beings are masterworks of excellence, and not even the best of
those we have the chance to love are wholly 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 his or 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 love of
whole persons, but only for love of that abstract version of persons which
consists of the complex of their best qualities. This is the reason why per-
sonal affection ranks so low in Plato’s scala amoris. When loved as con-
geries of valuable qualities, persons cannot compete with abstractions of
universal significance, like schemes of social reform or scientific and philo-
sophical truths, still less with the Idea of Beauty in its sublime transcen-
dence, ‘pure, clear, unmixed, not full of human flesh and colour and other
mortal nonsense’ (Smp. 21 lei—3). The high climactic moment of fulfil-
ment—the peak achievement for which all lesser loves are to be ‘used as
steps’95—is the one farthest removed from affection for concrete human
beings.
Since persons in their concreteness are thinking, feeling, wishing, hoping,
fearing beings, to think of love for them as love for objectifications of excel-
lence is to fail to make the thought of them as subjects central to what is
felt for them in love. The very exaltation of the beloved in the erotic idyll
in the Phaedrus views him from an external point of view. Depicting him
as an adorable cult object, Plato seems barely conscious of the fact that
this ‘holy image’96 is himself a valuing subject, a centre of private experi-
ence and individual preference, whose predilections and choice of ends are
no reflex of the lover’s97 and might well cross his at some points even while
returning his love. Transposing this from erotics to politics we see the
reason for the tragedy of the Republic, we see why its effort to foster civic
love obliterates civil liberty. The fashioner of this utopia has evidently
failed to see that what love for our fellows requires of us is, above all, imag-
inative sympathy and concern for what they themselves think, feel, and
want. He has, therefore, missed that dimension of love in which tolerance,
trust, forgiveness, tenderness, respect have validity. Apart from these
imperatives the notion of loving persons as ‘ends in themselves’98 would
make no sense. No wonder that we hear of nothing remotely like it from
Plato. Had such a thought occurred to him, his theory could have seen in

® ώσπερ έπαναβασμοϊς χρώ/ιενον; 211c3—an image for the idea that every other love is a
means to the attainment of this one (an idea expressed no less than three times in two Stephanus
pages 210a-212b: cf. n. 67 above). * 251a6.
97
Which is what the boy’s love turns out to be (255a ff ); he wants what his lover wants,‘only
more feebly’ (255e2-3). 9)1
Cf. n. 24 above.
162 GREGORY VLASTOS

it only conceptual error and moral confusion. On the terms of that theory,
to make flesh-and-blood men and women terminal objects of our affection
would be folly, or, worse, idolatry, diversion to images of what is due only
to their divine original. We are a prey to this error, Plato would say, because
of our carnal condition, burdened with incompleteness which fellow
creatures have power to complete;99 were we free of mortal deficiency we
would have no reason to love anyone or anything except the Idea: seen
face to face, it would absorb all our love. Here we see the polar opposite
of the ideal which has moulded the image of the deity in the Hebraic and
Christian traditions: that of a Being whose perfection empowers it to love
the imperfect; of a Father who cares for each of his children as they are,
does not proportion affection to merit, gives it no more to the righteous
than to the perverse and deformed. Not even Aristotle had any inkling of
such a notion"10—indeed, he less than Plato, whose God is impelled by love
for Beauty to create and thereby to share his own goodness with his crea-
tures,101 while Aristotle’s Prime Mover remains eternally complete in the
stillness of his own perfection. Discerning the possibility of a kind of love
which wishes for another’s existence, preservation, and good for that
other’s sake, Aristotle thought only men could have it and only few men
for few.To universalize that kind of love, to extend it to the slave, to impute
it to the deity, would have struck him as quite absurd.
Though so much of what I have said here has been critical of Plato, this
was only incidental to the effort to understand him. And since he is a
philosopher whose separate ventures must be seen in the context of his
synoptic vision, let me point out in closing how Plato’s speculation struc-
tures love in the same way as it does knowledge in epistemology, the world-
order in cosmology, the interrelations of particular and universal, time and
eternity, the world of sense and the world of thought in ontology. In each
of these areas the factors of the analytic pattern arc the same: the tran- **

** This is the point of

Aristophanes' myth in the
Symposium. as has often
been noticed, and
it is picked up and
emphasized in another way
in Diotima's speech (cf. n.
20 above).
m
Aristotle's conception of
perfect qtliu does not
repudiate—does not even
notice—what
I have called above ‘the
cardinal flaw' in Platonic
love. His intuition takes him
as far as seeing
that {a) disinterested
affection for the person we
love—the active desire to
promote that person’s
good for that person's sake,
not for ours’—must be built
into love at its best, but not
as far as
sorting this out from (h)
appreciation of the
excellences instantiated by
that person; (¿>), of course,
need not be disinterested
and could be egoistic. The
limits of Aristotle’s
understanding of love
show up in his failure to
notice the ambiguity in
Moving a person for
himself, (fueiv uvu dt'
¿KVTVOV—a phrase which
may be used to express
 THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN OBJECT OF LOVE
16
3

scendent Form at one extreme, the temporal individual at the other, and.
in between, the individuals’ immanent characters, projections of eternity
on the flickering screen of becoming. And everywhere Plato gives the Form
pre-eminence. In epistemology it is the object of knowledge: sensible
particulars can only be objects of that low-grade cognitive achievement
opinion. In cosmology only the Forms represent completely lucid order;
physical individuals, enmeshed in brute necessity, are only quasi-orderly,
as they are only quasi-intelligible. In ontology there are grades of reality
and only Forms have the highest grade. So too in the theory of love the
respective roles of Form and temporal individual are sustained: the indi-
vidual cannot be as lovable as the Idea; the Idea, and it alone, is to be loved
for its own sake; the individual only so far as in him and by him ideal per-
fection is copied fugitively in the flux.
 Socrates and Plato
The Dialectics of Eros
 SETH BENARDETE

Socrates and Plato

The Dialectics of Eros

Eros is central to Plato in a way that it is not for

any other philosopher. In order to indicate the
range and intricacy of the problem of eros in
Plato,
it is useful to begin with four apparently random
observations. In the course of the more
systematic
account it should become clear how these obser-
vations are interconnected; but at the head of
everything, let a working definition of eros be
put
to which an appeal can be made from time to
time
as the occasion warrants. Eros combines the
desire
to behold at a distance with the desire to join
into
one. The lovers awareness that the beloved is
already complete is coupled with his awareness
of
his own radical incompleteness, which forces
him
in turn to realize simultaneously that he could be
completed if and only if the beloved, against the
lover’s own conviction, were also incomplete 19
and
could be completed per impossibile by the lover.
With Plato, for the first time, man becomes
a
metaphysical problem, and love a metaphysical
passion. The ontology of the Republic and the
cos-
 mology of the Timaeus give expression to the
metaphysical problem of man, and the Phaedrus
and Symposium reveal the metaphysics of this
pas-
sion. The Republic and Timaeus get to ontology
through the political problem for man, and the
Phaedrus and Symposium go through the passion
to ontology. In this sense the two movements
are
of the same order, but it seems that the political
occasions the ascent to the metaphysical through
construction, whether it be of the best city in
speech or of the universe as a likely story, but
love
gives rise to metaphysics directly, without the
intervention of the mythical or imaginary. The
lover speaks spontaneously of truth and eternity.
Love thus seems more natural than politics. It is
far less easy to see how the political or any of
its
experiences can become metaphysical, which
we
see happening so abruptly in the Republic, than
how what starts out as a simply human
experience
undergoes by itself a transformation into some-
thing that seems to bear the impress of what is
more than human. That the Phaedrus, however,
connects the issue of writing - a making - with
eros shows that the artificial belongs as much to
the understanding of eros as to the understanding
of right. Perhaps it would be better to say that
Plato has two themes, justice and love, both in
their relation to one another and in their relation
to mind. Psychology lurks behind the apparent
split between eros and right. The soul of man is 2 1
the
problem.
 In making the soul of man the problem,
Plato
dethrones eros as a cosmological force, as it
appears in either the poets (Hesiod) or the pre-
Socratic philosophers (Empedocles and Parmen-
ides). Even Aristotle, who does not mention eros
in his treatise on the soul, has recourse to it in
Metaphysics A, where he attempts to explain the
relation nature has to mind thinking itself, and
which Dante expresses in the last line of
Paradiso,
Vamor che move il sole e Valtre stelle.1 Plato, how-
ever, in canceling eros as the universal principle
of
attraction, elevates it ontologically. He distin-
guishes between the way from the principles and
the way to the principles. The first way is hypo-
thetical and deductive and suitable for teaching,
the second goes from the that of things to the
why
of things; it is the only way of discovery and
phi-
losophy.2 The Platonic dialogues are a peculiar
combination of these two ways, the way of in-
struction and the way of division and collection,
or dialectics for short. Now if one starts not
from
the principles but proceeds to the principles, the

1 Metaphysics 1072a7-1072b4. The reason for its absence from de

anima has to do with Aristotle’s plan to present soul entirely in
terms of agent and patient, which culminates in the distinction
2 Phaedrus 265c8-266bl; Sophist 253c6-e2.
between active and passive intellect, and the consequent isomor-
phism between the sense and the sensed that Aristotle tries to
establish
from Book II on. The duality of eros does not fit into this scheme,
for the ultimate identity of thinking and the thing thought precludes
distance. The movement of de anima is away from soul and toward 23
mind: there is but one mention of soul after 417b24 (420b28) until
it
returns at 427al7 with the theme of the first book, that soul is the
principle of both motion and awareness.
start for us is to be found in the simply human
things, everything which concerns us and with
which we deal. It is what Aristotle calls the
things
first for us, ta pragmata, the business at hand,
rather than ta onta, the things that are. In the
Lysis,
Socrates comes into his own as soon as he aban-
dons cosmological speculation about the preva-
lence of friendship and enmity throughout
nature
and turns instead to the neutrality of being, and
his primary example of a being that is neither
good nor bad is man.3 The titles of twenty-four
of
Plato’s dialogues contain the names of Socrates’
contemporaries.
Plato has two themes, political philosophy
and philosophy simply. Of the thirty-five dia-
logues that have come down to us as Plato’s,
Socrates narrates only four of them from start to
finish: Republic, Charmides, Lysis, Erastae. Plato
represents Socrates as particularly eager in just
these four cases to review for another audience
what he had discussed one or two days before.
The occasion that prompted each discussion
must
have been just as important to Socrates as what
he
discussed. They represent through self-narration
Socrates’ awareness of what he has now come to
understand and of what he has not yet
3 Lysis 216cl-4.
understood
as well as how he came to understand what he
did
and how he failed to understand what he did not. 25
In form at least they show Socrates’ self-knowl-
edge. The Republic is many times larger and
grander than the other three combined. Its theme
is justice, which seems more urgent,
controversial,
and important than the themes of the other three.
Eros, on the other hand, sets the stage for the dif-
ferent themes of the others, whether it be the
sin-
gular beauty of Charmides, the bashful and baf-
fled lover Hippothales in the Lysis, or the rivalry
between an egghead and a muscle man in the
Era-
stae. They seem to be concerned with what is
most
intimately Socrates’ own and least applicable to
anyone else. As soon as Socrates returns to
Athens
after being on campaign at Potidaea, which her-
alded the start of the Peloponnesian War, he
asks
about the state of affairs there; and he does not
mean whether the peace-party or the war-party
have the upper hand, but how did philosophy
fare
in his absence and who are the new crop of
beau-
ties.4 Socrates confesses to his sexual arousal in
the
Charmides, and he says in the Lysis that just as
dif-
ferent people desire different things, so he since
4 Charmides 153d2-5.
childhood has155d3-e2;
5 Charmides been Lysis
erotically
211d7-e8. disposed toward
the
acquisition of friends.5 Despite this difference
between the Republic and the other three dia-
logues, all of them do have one thing in 27
common:
in the entire Platonic corpus the verb »to blush«
{eruthrian) occurs only when Socrates is the nar-
rator. The blush is the involuntary showing of
what one wants to remain hidden. It reveals a
de-
fect that one may or may not acknowledge to be
a defect. It is clearly related to the issue of eros
and
self-knowledge. These four dialogues are the in-
visible blush of Socrates.6
Two of these dialogues bring us closer to the
heart of the problem, the Charmides and Erastae.
The Charmides starts from the question of sophro-
sune or moderation and then, through the inter-
vention of a future tyrant, shifts into the
problem-
atical identification of sophrosune with the
science
of science. Socrates proves that whoever has
this
science of science must be wholly ignorant of
every other science. In the Erastae, on the other
hand, Socrates questions the competence of the
philosopher or himself, who, in comparison
with
any specialist, is the jack-of-all-trades and
master
of none. The two dialogues together raise the
issue
of the whole and its parts, and whether the guid-
ance to the understanding of any part must come
from the problem of the whole. The Erastae
6 At the end of the fourth book of the Nicomachean Ethics
opens Aristotle
with denies
Socrates coming
that shame across
is a moral virtue two
and inboys who
the tenth bookare
he
claims a
disputing some cosmological thesis by means
self-sufficiency for the theoretical life. In the last five of
drawings and gestures. Theofmeaning of its title,
chapters the
tenth book soul occurs once (1179b25). If one doubts that
, along with its alternate title Anterastae or
Loverssuch
Rival completeness
Lovers
in.
is attainable in either case, shame comes back
, suggests to us that the problem of
29
the whole may have a connection with the
human
whole, the longing for which seems to be eros,
and
that that connection may lie in the equally prob-
lematic character of eros, which only ceases to
be
so when it is recognized to be philosophy
Last observation and then we are done.
Whatever question Plato raises, whether it be
what is justice or what is eros, what is death or
what is courage, what is moderation or what is
piety, the answer always seems to be the same:
phi-
losophy. No matter how remote from
philosophy
a question may appear to be, for example, what
is
the love of gain or what is law, the argument
always turns around and points to philosophy.
To 7 Phaedo 64a4-6; 67d7-10.
8 Republic 449b
philosophize, 1-6. In the says
Socrates Republic
inSocrates formulatesistheto
the Phaedo,
principles
7
practice
behinddying and being
the necessity dead.the Who
to investigate cantrivial
apparently say
things. He
what starts with the self-evident species »music.« This species
could not have spun out of the whisper?8
Platobreaks
down into speeches (myths), modes, and rhythms, which are
The novel
to after all is just the Platonic dialoguebe
consistent with one another and the character of the future
guardians of the best city in speech. Socrates easily lays
down the
criteria for speeches and the manner of their representation;
Glau-
con, in light of Socrates’ professed ignorance of the proper
modes,
supplies them, though, according to Aristotle, not entirely
correctly
(Politics 1342a32-1342b 1); and finally both Socrates and
Glaucon
give up when it comes to finding the appropriate rhythms. It
is at
this point, on the analogy of letters, which one skilled in
gram-
matike must be able to read regardless of their size, that 31
Socrates
declares they are not yet »musical« if they do not know the
species
of moderation and courage in the same way (402a7-d4). Their
fail-
ure to deduce how music would show up on the »insides of
the
soul« (401d6-7) proves that they began with opinion and not
knowledge. Socrates thus slips philosophy into politics.
without Socrates, and Apuleius wrote the first
one
about nosiness (curiositas). No human
experience,
Plato would seem to claim, does not reveal at its
core the quest for knowledge of the whole. Phi-
losophy comprehends the apparent manifold of
things and the single truth of their meaning.
More
precisely, the one thing needful for man is latent
in
everything men say, do, and experience. There
is a
coincidence in philosophy and only in
philosophy
of the understanding of all human things with
the
human good.9 Now the masters of human
experi-
ence, long before there were philosophers, were
the poets, who were called simply the wise.
They
are the competitors to the audacious imperialism
of Plato, who threatens to take over each and
every well-defined domain and, in
reconstituting
it as a question, uncover philosophy within it.
The
two speakers in the Symposium who precede
Socrates and form a group with him are the
comic
poet Aristophanes and the tragic poet Agathon.
9 Cf. Xenophon Memorabilia 4.5.12-6.1.
Socrates’ speech is not the union of their two
speeches but a third that shows the partial
under-
standing of both poets, and thereby of tragedy 33

and
comedy if taken separately. The tragedy and
com-
edy of life, which we take to be the
comprehensive
understanding of human life, is the phantom
image of its true understanding, philosophy,
which is neither tragic nor comic but can be
mis-
taken for one or the other. That Socrates laughs
only in the Phaedo warns us against this mistake.
The two gods who owe more to poetry than to
cult are Hades and Eros. Poetry’s discovery or
in-
vention of these gods thus turns out to be a chal-
lenge to Plato. He has to show that the god Eros
does not exist and Hades is nothing but a name
for
the city. The Cave of the Republic reveals Hades
for what it is, the daimonion of the Symposium
cuts the god Eros down to size.
Plato does not always put all his cards on
the
table. The missing cards show up with a
negative
label that safely disposes of them and thus does
not allow any access to their possible
connection,
no matter how subterranean, with that from
which they have been officially excluded. For
Plato, however, negation is always the other of
the
other.10 11 Philosophy therefore tends to become
conspicuous at the boundaries of things, where
it
binds together what seems to be apart and sep-
arates what seems to be together.11 Now the
private
cannot be exposed and go public and still
remain
what it is. Love, in particular, we say, is private
10 Sophist 258a4-5.
and11 Euthydemus 305c6-306c5.
nonpolitical. Lovers turn toward each other and
away from everyone else. There is a veil over
them
even in broad daylight. The political can thus 35

get
constituted without the intrusion of eros. Plato
offers two striking confirmations of this. The
Republic discusses the good political order along
with the good order of the soul. The virtue that
controls desire is moderation and strictly
subordi-
nate to the virtue of justice, whose natural basis
is
in the spirited part of the soul, and this, if it is
not
corrupt, has a natural ally in reason, which
desire
never has. Since the overturning of the political
order as such is to be found in tyranny, it is
inevitable that the tyrant come forward as Eros
incarnate.12 So what began as either prepolitical
or
unpolitical roars back as the enemy of the
political:
the city in the meantime was totally
communized
and privacy institutionally banned. Likewise, in
the Timaeus, which is bound closely to the
Repub-
lic, eros does not belong to the original constitu-
tion of man, but the gods devise it in the second
generation, after men have become unmanly
and
unjust.13 Of course, were this Plato’s last word,
it
12 Republic 573a4-b8. The first to erect an altar to Eros in Attica
would was be impossible for political philosophy
and an intimate of the Pisistratids; he was polemarch and placed it
in the
philosophy to Academy
groves of the cohere.(Athenaeus
Socrates restricts
609CD what
= Kleidemos he
fr. 15
13 Timaeus 90e6-91a5.
[Die 14
knows to the177a8;
14 Fragmente
Symposium der
erotic things.
griechischen
This restriction
Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby, 3. Teil,
Theages 128bl-4.
may B, 323]).
15 Timaeus 19c8-20al.
explain Socrates’ self-confessed incapacity to
set
his own best city in motion, and why he must
rely 37

on philosophers who are equally statesmen to

do
it for him.15
 In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger breaks
radically with his legislative program in the
tenth
book. There he introduces a theology, which
demonstrates that there are gods and they are
just.
The central teaching of this theology is the
prior-
ity of soul. The soul is defined as self-motion.
Socrates too had offered the same definition in
the Phaedms, but he had linked it, albeit some-
what mysteriously, with eros. Now the Athenian
Stranger assigns the same priority to certain
char-
acteristics of soul as he attributes to the soul
itself.
He first restricts these characteristics to opinion,
care, mind, art, and law, and we are led to
suppose
by the company it is in that by opinion he means
true opinion; but later he grants the same
priority
no less to false opinion than to true; and he then
expands the list to include joy and pain, confi-
dence and fear, hatred and affection, but he
never
adds to soul either eros or desire {epithumia)}b
Socrates’ myth of the Phaedrus has been
legalized
and stripped of its wings: in the Laws there is
nothing beyond the visible heaven. This is as it
16 Laws 892b3—8; 896e8-897a3.
should be. Socrates says that the fundamental
17 Phaedrus 252a4-6; 265al 0-11.
experience of the lover involves his utter
contempt
for all the lawful and decent things in which he
once took pride.16 17 At the beginning of the 39

Laws,
the Athenian Stranger criticizes Dorian
practices
for their exclusive concern with resistance to
pain
without providing for any defense against the
in-
sidiousness of pleasure. He traces to the com-
mon mess in which all males participate the
preva-
lence of pederasty in Crete and the looseness of
women in Sparta. He therefore proposes a
reorien-
tation of the law away from courage and toward
moderation, but when he has finished with his
reeducation and set up the institutions to support
it, he admits in Book VIII that he has not come
any closer than the Dorians to confining eros
within the law; indeed, he has exacerbated the
problem by making all the young idle.18
The conflict between eros and law would
seem to point to the opposition between philoso-
phy and the city. That opposition would dissolve
apparently in the rule of the philosopher-king;
but
that solution concedes not only that the oppo-
sition persists as long as the philosopher does
not
rule but that philosophy itself never rules. When
the philosopher rules he does not philosophize:
he
descends into the Cave and does not free any of
the prisoners from their chains: were they to get
their hands on him they would kill him.19 In the

18 Laws 835d4-e2. The first to formulate the opposition between law

and eros was Herodotus. He restricts the verbs erasthai and eran to
19 Republic
desires 517a4-6. the law, whether they be the desire for tyr-
that transgress
anny or for what is sexually forbidden by law. His Inquiries opens
with Candaules’ eros provoking him to demand that Gyges see his
wife naked (1.8.1), and it closes with Xerxes’ eros for his brother’s
wife (9.108.1). The second half of the first book begins with Deio-
ces’ eros for tyranny (1.96.2). If one considers that Herodotus does
not follow Gyges’ advice, to look to his own, one has the
41
difference
between the political and philosophy.
Republic Socrates says the first experience of
phi-
losophy induces the contravention of the law,
and
he compares it to the awakening of the suspicion
that one is not the legitimate offspring of one’s
parents.20 Everything one thought to be noble,
just, and good now appears to be merely estab-
lished by law, with no more grounds for its truth
than the assurance the parents of Oedipus could
give him that he was theirs. It is not accidental
that
Oedipus’s philosophical doubt, despite their as-
surance, should result in Sophocles’ play being
called Oedipus the Tyrant. Oedipus, through the
crime of patricide, which he commits before he
solves the riddle of the Sphinx, and the crime of
incest, which he commits afterwards, enacts phi-
losophy’s desacralization of everything in the
ele-
ment of self-ignorance. That self-ignorance
shows
up in Oedipus’s ignorance not only of his own
ori-
gin but of the meaning of his solution to the
riddle
of the Sphinx. Oedipus did not solve the riddle
but
uncovered the true riddle, man, for he never re-
flected on why he alone should have been able
to 20 Republic 537el-539a4.
solve it. 241dl-242a4.
21 Sophist Plato’s effort consists in stripping
tragedy
from Oedipus and equipping him with self-
knowledge. Just as the city Socrates devises in
43
the
Republic necessarily allows for incest, so Plato’s
Eleatic Stranger must beg Theaetetus’s pardon if
he is to go on to kill his father Parmenides.21
 Before I turn to the Phaedrus and Symposium
as containing the twinned account of eros, a
word
should be said about the two dialogues that form
an equally natural pair with each other as well as
with the Phaedrus and Symposium. Inasmuch as
the Phaedrus is about philosophical rhetoric, its
counterpart is the Gorgias, whose general theme
is
political rhetoric but whose particular focus is
on
punitive rhetoric. As for the Protagoras, all the
main characters in the Symposium, with the
excep-
tion of Aristophanes, showed up in it when they
were much younger. Socrates likens his entrance
into the setting of the Protagoras to Odysseus’s
descent into Hades.22 The Protagoras differs from
all other Platonic dialogues in consistently
adding
piety as a fifth virtue to the classical four of wis-
dom, justice, moderation, and courage. Now
there
would be a natural basis for piety if it could be
shown that the experience of eros points to the
divinity of Eros. Socrates sets out to demolish
that
possibility in the Symposium, and in the Phaedrus
to account for the belief in the god Eros. The
Gor-
gias and Protagoras thus look like the political
reflections of the two philosophical dialogues on
22 Protagoras 315b9-c8.
eros, and emphasize, especially if one considers
the extreme punitiveness of Protagoras’s myth,
how much the city has to do with punishment
45
and
how absent such a consideration is from
philoso-
phy. Those two political dialogues correspond in
the schema Socrates outlines in the Gorgias to
rhetoric and sophistry respectively; and rhetoric
and sophistry are there said to be phantom
images
of the true political art, the corrective part of
which is justice and whose educative part is the
art
of legislation.23 Sophistry and rhetoric, however,
are not in their mimicry as distinct as the
originals,
and their practitioners are mixed up together.24
The Gorgias and Protagoras thus stand opposed to
the Republic and Laws, on the one side, and, on
the other side, to the Phaedrus and Symposium.
We can say therefore that rhetoric represents a
confusion or mixture of what the Republic and
Phaedrus clearly distinguish, and sophistry, in
turn, represents an equal confusion of what the
Laws and Symposium separate. Rhetoric confuses
the just with the beautiful, sophistry confuses
the
beautiful with the good.25 Agathon, who more
than anyone else in the Symposium insists on the
beauty of Eros, indulges at the end of his speech
in
Gorgianic jingles.
Socrates says his sole knowledge is of eros.
He
has an erotic art. The phrase itself smacks of
self-
23 Gorgias 464b2-d3.
contradiction or at least of paradox. If it is an
24 Gorgias 465c3-5.
art,25 Gorgias 448c7-9; Timaeus 19e2-3. it
is as specialized as any other art with its own
prin-
ciples and domain. As an art, it would either
47
con-
template or make the things of its domain. If it
contemplates erotic things as logistics does
num-
bers, it knows what kinds of erotic things there
are, how many there are, and how they stand in
relation to one another. If it makes erotic things,
it
knows out of what kinds of things they can be
made, but always waits on its customers for
what-
ever product they want. Insofar as Socrates’
erotic
art is contemplative, it seems to be presented in
the
Symposium, and insofar as it is a kind of making,
the Phaedrus would give it its general
formulation,
and the Lysis would exemplify it: there Socrates,
as
if he were a snake-oil salesman, demonstrates
for
free, in the presence of a lover, how he can
ensnare
his beloved. The erotic art would thus be a kind
of
rhetoric on the one hand and a kind of
speculative
method on the other. It would be a physics of
illu-
sions and resemble nothing so much as Aristo-
phanes’ mockery of Socrates: he has
»Cloudesses«
at his beck and call, and they can appear in any
shape they want while being composed them-
selves of the elementary nature of things. How-
ever plausible it may appear to be to identify
49
this
speculative rhetoric with Socrates’ erotic art, it
cannot be right, because eros is clearly identified
with philosophy. What could the art of philoso-
phy mean? It cannot mean that philosophy is
either a poetic art and only knows what it makes
or a deductive science, without in either case
ceas-
ing to be philosophy. The art of philosophy can
only mean the art of dialegesthai. Dialegesthai
divides between its ordinary sense »to
converse«
and its precise sense »dialectics.« The conversa-
tions men engage in and the dialectics Socrates
practices are and are not separable.
Socrates says he has always been a lover
(erastes) of a way than which none is more
beauti-
ful, but which often abandons him and leaves
him
perplexed.26 Socrates is a lover of philosophy;
he
does not and cannot philosophize at the drop of
a hat, as if a philosophical question were already
there and all he had to do would be to face it and
handle it. Only two dialogues begin without any
preliminaries with what we may call a
philosoph-
ical question - they start straight off with the
ques-
tion, »What is?« - and in both cases the inter-
locutor is anonymous. That the love of the good
emerges as the theme of one (Hipparchus) and
law
is the theme of the other (Minos) seems not unre-
lated to their evidently philosophical character:
Socrates says that law wants to be the discovery
of
what is.27 Philosophy, in any case, cannot be
some-
thing that one does. There must be, then, a pre-
philosophical state of the lover of the
philosophy
from which he begins. This preliminary
26 Philebus 16b5-7.
condition
27 Minos 315a2-3.
shows up in ordinary conversation, and only
because of a turn within it does it begin to
become
dialectics. Socrates asks Cephalus in the Republic 51

how he finds old age; and his putative concern

with his own old age, as if he did not know that
Athens would cut his life short, prompts this
friendly but idle question.28 Cephalqs Speaks of
several things, the weakness of old ag^ the
change
in desires time brings, money, the hopes anC[ ter-
rors of the afterlife, and justice. Socrates picks
jus-
tice out of the medley of Cephalus’s remarks;
but
one can readily see that either death <^r desire
no
less than the love of gain, could have occasioned
another kind of discussion. Now 0nce justice
becomes the question, it does not become phi-
losophic before the question of what justice is
gets
disentangled from the question what good it is.29
This disengagement, however, of interest from
being is merely a surface transformation: what is
still pushing the discussion is interest in justice,
for
without such an interest any answe^ no matter
how defective, would be, in the face Qf indiffer-
ence, as satisfactory as any other.30 CQnseqUently5
the occasion and the question cannot separated
even while they are being separated. What keeps
them together is the philosopher s self-
28 Republic 517a4-6.
knowledge,
29 Republic 354al3-c3; Gorgias 463cl-5. The twin jssues ^eing
which and essentially
good emerge apartdepends
in the Minos on maintaining
and Hipparcp, a
us ^ut a„am not
doublein their most precise form: even the philosop^ question is
not entirely philosophical. Socrates asks his ano^ymous comrade,
vision:
»WhatWhat is for
is the law it?usi«,
andandWhat
the love good isnorma
of gain ha/ it>Hy£a ros is ’
restricted meaning and does not automatically s. „est CqU;va_
the name
lence to for this double
the question of the good.vision. It is die bond
between what is to be known and wh^t it means to
30 Charmides 161 c3-6; 162b8-11.

53
know it. It consists in the acknowledgment that
the need for separation, which makes
understand-
ing possible, and the desire for union, which
would make satisfaction possible, cannot be
natu-
rally overcome. The invisible blush of Socrates
marks the difference between his general aware-
ness of the necessary incompleteness of philoso-
phy, despite its constituting the completely
human
life,31 32 and his growing awareness of the partial
structure of its incompleteness and his
ignorance.
To have the erotic art is to have the capacity to
get
absorbed in the question at hand and never
forget
oneself. Plato’s way of representing this to us is
to
raise the most difficult of questions while
making
Socrates the most vividly conceived of
individuals.
The anonymity of mind has the most distinctive
of
human faces. Socrates at one point identifies his
daimonion, or as one might say his fateful
individu-
ality, with eros.i2
In one sense, the Symposium contains the en-
31 Apology of Socrates 38al-7.
tire32 Socratic teaching on eros, in just the way the
Theages 128bl-d3.
Republic is the Socratic teaching on justice; but
the
Republic is supplemented by two other political
dialogues, the Statesman and Laws. The States- 55

man analyzes the human condition if there are

no
gods, and the wise man were to rule; the Laws
conceives of a city in which the philosopher
does
not rule but laws rule in his stead. Laws can rule
only if they are written and readily available to
every citizen and formulated within his capacity;
otherwise, one would have to rely on the
memory
of the oldest members of the community. The
Phaedrus inserts its supplementary teaching about
eros into the broader topic of persuasion, and per-
suasion in turn is considered in both its spoken
and written forms. There is, then, an obvious
con-
nection between the Laws and the Phaedrus, for
the Athenian Stranger wishes to put preludes that
know how to persuade in front of laws that hith-
erto have only threatened. That these two dia-
logues alone occur outside the city strengthens
their connection: they are concerned with the
philosopher’s return to the city. As Socrates
says,
despite his love of learning, the countryside and
the trees are unwilling to teach him.33 Cicero also
acknowledged the kinship between the Laws and
Phaedrus by borrowing his setting for his
dialogue
on laws from the Phaedrus. These formal connec-
tions, including the Athenian Stranger’s adapta-
tion of Socrates’ myth in the Phaedrus, get further
confirmation if one considers that the Socratic
teaching about eros in the Symposium cuts the
good away from the beautiful, to which eros was
conventionally attached, whereas the myth of the
Phaedrus seemingly ignores the teaching of the
Symposium , puts the beautiful back in place as the
33 Phaedrus 230d3-4.
core of eros, and does not set the good among the

57
so-called hyperuranian beings. We have, then,
the
proportion that the good is to the beautiful as the
Symposium is to the Phaedrus. Socrates’ teaching
about eros, which he presented not as his but Dio-
tima’s, became known many years after its dis-
closure at a private party and involved an oral
transmission through two lovers of Socrates, and
the one to whom we listen is quite out of his
mind
with virulent denunciations of others, self-con-
tempt, and senseless adoration of Socrates.34 The
Socratic teaching thus leaks out to a wider public
quite by accident. What, however, would be the
case if there were a more reliable means of trans-
mission? The beautiful, I suggest, would become
the public face of the good: in the second Letter
Plato says there is no writing of his nor will there
ever be, but what is now said belongs to a
Socrates
become young and beautiful.35 The Phaedrus,
then, is concerned with the perpetuation of Soc-
rates by other means, and the Laws, accordingly,
concerns the perpetuation of the wise ruler by
written law. The Phaedrus analyzes the relation
between Socrates and Plato, the Laws the relation
between the philosopher and the lawgiver.
Now the assertion that the Symposium
teaches
that eros is always of the good disregards the
massive contradiction in that teaching between
34 Symposium 173c2-d7; Phaedo 117d3—6.
its
35 Epistle II 314cl-4.
initial argument for the primacy of the good and

59
its final vision about the primacy of the beautiful.
This contradiction dissolves as soon as one real-
izes that Diotima has to account for the difficulty
that, if eros is the universal desire for the good,
not everyone is called a lover. The account of the
truth includes an account of error. Diotima’s ex-
planation is that the desire for self-perpetuation,
whether it be in sexual generation, deeds of great
renown, or poetic production, overlays the true
duality of eros with its poetic version, so that the
eternal desire for the good on the part of the indi-
vidual becomes the desire for the eternal
perpetu-
ation of the individual.36 What is the good in the
element of philosophy becomes the beautiful in
the element of production. This occurs through
the easy shift that eros undergoes from being a
predicate to being a subject. As a predicate, eros
is
initially a stative verb. In Greek, in any case, this
usage is the commonest one.37 Its expression is
»He is in love« or »She has fallen in love«, and
not
»He loves So-and-so.« The experience of eros,

36 Timaeus first describes eros as the eros for generation (german)

without any restriction on what is to be generated; but when he
goes
on to describe woman’s desire, it is exclusively for the generation
of
children (91b2-c2). The pederastic bias of Diotima’s account has
to
do with the absence of any natural offspring in such a relation and
hence204b5-c2.
37 Lysis the greater pressure it is under to justify itself and become
philosophic despite itself: the absence in pederasty of any token of
the future even as a hope makes it more conscious of man’s
mortal-
ity. Pausanias’ speech mirrors perfectly the need and the incoher-
ence of its self-justification. The second half of Diotima’s
argument 61
is meant to bring out the range that human eros occupies when it
comes to generation.
however, is inseparable from its transitivity. “To
love” is also a verb in the active voice; it
therefore
sets up automatically its object as the passive
recipient of itself as agent. The lover constitutes
the beloved and believes that just as if he were to
punish, someone would be punished, so if he
loves, someone is loved. Although eros in itself
has
no power to effect a transformation of the object
into its patient, the lover feels compelled to
assign
the love to the beloved. Because the beloved is
responsible for the eros of the lover, he is, the
lover
believes, eros. The cause is identified with its
effect.
The neediness of the lover is now the fullness of
eros as embodied in the beloved. It is primarily
for
this reason that Plato splits his account between
the Symposium and the Phaedrus. The various
speakers in the Symposium express how they have
experienced eros; they therefore slide easily from
the desire itself to what is desired, friendship or
equality between lover and beloved. They thus
praise eros as if it were not essentially a defective
mode, but they endow it instead with what they
believe it can achieve, the perfection of the be-
loved. Eros is both the cause of their lack and its
cure. Aristophanes alone sees that eros is self-
con-
scious neediness, but because he disassociates it
from mind and holds it to be aiming at an
utopian
self-completion, without the intermediary of the 63

beautiful or the good - it would in fact entail the

total reconstruction of man - it is the ground of
total despair. Agathon, on the other hand,
absorbs
eros entirely into the beautiful, so that it ceases to
be defective and becomes indistinguishable from
the devices of poetry.
The two speeches Socrates makes in the
Phaedrus mirror the single series of speeches he
reports of Diotima s in the Symposium.38 Just as
Diotima’s speeches proceed from eros of the
good
to eros of the beautiful (and beyond), so
Socrates’
first speech is about the good and the second
about the beautiful. The first speech of Socrates
is
well laid out. It begins with a definition of eros
and
then goes on from the goods of the soul to those
of
the body and ends up with pleasure. It argues for
the nongratification of the lover by the beloved.
Its perfectly sensible arguments are undercut by
their speaker; Socrates presents him as a lover
who
has convinced his beloved that he is a nonlover.
Now the nonlover by definition is the beloved.
So
the lover puts on the disguise of the beloved and
supplies
38 Diotima the
is onereasons
of the fourwhy
womenthein beloved should
Socrates’ Platonic life;not
the
other three are his mother Phaenarete, Pericles’ mistress Aspasia,
be seduced. Socrates does not supply the second
and his wife Xanthippe. Socrates as go-between and midwife has
halfhisof the speech, which was the original chal-
model in his mother’s art (Theaetetus); Aspasia is the power behind
lenge, as political
Pericles’ to why the (Menexenos),
rhetoric beloved, and in represents
rejecting the the
ease
with
lover,
which women could take over the political arena; Xanthippe’s ex-
should
lusiongratify the nonlover.
from Socrates’ Thisreveals
last conversation missing halfof is
the ways han-
dling grief that the law provides for women but not for men. Plato
indicates through these four women how impossible it would be to
characterize Socrates as male rather than female. He is as apolitical
as women necessarily were.

65
Socrates’ second speech, in which he praises the
lover, who is of course the speaker of the first
speech. Socrates will later say that the two
speeches
are one speech and correspond to the difference
between the way of instruction and the way of
dialectics.39 Plato’s arguments are relatively
short
and easy to follow, but the drift of each argument
is far more slippery, and how to discern the
dialec-
tical in the conversational surpasses everything
else in difficulty. In the Phaedms, the relation
between the first speech and its speaker encapsu-
lates the difference between the particularity of
circumstances and the universality of reason.
Their superficial connection is the modifications
the circumstantial imposes on the universal and
the necessary; but as this case shows, it is not
pos-
sible to pull them apart and discount in some
meas-
ured way the interests of the speaker from the
speech. Accordingly, in order to attain to the true
relation between the circumstantial and the
neces-
sary, it is necessary to discover in the circum-
stantial itself the universal. This discovery
discloses
39 Phaedrus 262cl0-d2.
the beautiful as the concrete universal.
40 1) Four kinds of madness; 2) Soul as self-motion; 3) Structure of
soul; Socrates’ second speech
4) Wing; 5) Hyperuranian beings; 6)is much
Nine types harder
of mind; to
7) The beautiful or eleven kinds of soul; 8) White and black horses;
grasp in its structure.
9) Socrates’ erotic art. The speech is in nine
parts.40

67
The first part is about four kinds of divine mad-
ness, of which eros is the highest. Socrates will
go
on to argue that eros is the height of sopbrosune,
or
moderation and self-knowledge, and it is
identical
with his own erotic art.41 This astonishing claim
brings us back to the Republic, where we also
find
an analysis of the structure of the soul. In that
analysis, there is a conspicuous flaw. Whereas it
is
reasonable to suppose that wisdom is the natural
perfection of reason, and courage the natural per-
fection of the spirited element (thumos), moder-
ation cannot be understood as the natural perfec-
tion of desire. That misalignment can be said to
be
corrected in the Phaedrus, if in fact a certain kind
of madness proves to be the highest kind of
sanity.
At the same time, the difference between the two
presentations of soul underlines the difference
between the politicized soul of the Republic and
the erotic soul of the Phaedrus. Socrates admits in
the Republic that its political dimension checks
him from giving a precise account of soul.42
41 What suggests the underground alliance of virtue and eros in Plato is
The
that second
»virtue,« part
inasmuch as of to Socrates’
it pertains speechof
the complete excellence
the soul, rarely occurs in the plural: of its fifteen occurrences,
concerns
seven
the are
soulin the
asMeno, the third
and in the Republic
self-motion, part
the plural theofsoul’s
is used »the so-
called virtues of soul« and in the Laws of »the popular virtues«
structure.
(.RepublicWhereas
518d9; Lawsthe soul as self-motion is
968a2).
42 Republic 435c9-d8; cf. 484al-bl; Timaeus 89d7-e3.

69
couched in the form of an argument, the sound-
ness of whose reasoning one may question, the
soul’s structure is presented in an image, which
one may find more or less persuasive. The soul
consists of a chariot, charioteer, and two horses,
all
of them winged. Regardless of whether it
partakes
of some divine portion by nature or not, it is cer-
tainly as monstrous and complex as Typhon, the
last enemy of the Olympian gods.43 * For
Socrates
to achieve self-knowledge is to know whether he
has more in common with Typhon than the
divine. In the course of his speech, Socrates
gives
an interpretation of all the parts of the soul’s
image
except for one: he never interprets the chariot.
One sees at once that the soul’s structure entails
that the soul have parts, and if it has parts, it can-
not be said to move itself. Socrates might imply
that if and only if an argument could replace the
image, would the inconsistency between
principle
and structure disappear. This kind of inconsis-
tency shows up throughout Plato. In the Republic,
the principle of the city’s justice is one man/one
job: no one is to practice more than the one art
each knows perfectly. The class of warriors,
how-
43 Phaedrus 230a3-6; Hesiod Theogony 820-885. Lawful marriages
ever, who start out like everyone else with a
among the gods follow the defeat of Typhon.
single
art, the art of war, end up as the bond of the city,
uniting the rulers who know the art of rule and
the 71

artisans who severally know one art perfectly,

through embodying the lawful opinions of the
city but of which opinions they have no knowl-
edge. This necessary dilution of the principle for
the sake of the structure has its counterpart in
the
Phaedrus and makes one wonder why Socrates
needed the principle of self-motion at all if in
fact
he devotes the rest of his speech exclusively to
the
soul’s structure.
The fourth part of the speech concerns the
wing. The wing is that which lifts the soul
outside
the visible universe to the region beyond heaven,
where the direct vision of beings, to which no
admixture of becoming adheres, nourishes the
charioteer or mind. Socrates mentions at first
jus-
tice, moderation, and science. The gods easily go
beyond heaven, other souls have more or less
a difficult time of it;44 either the badness of the
horses or the charioteer hinders their ascent, but
no one can become a human being unless he has
caught a glimpse at least of the beings. The
human
soul, then, is constituted primarily by mind, or
the
capacity to understand whatever is said by
species,
in proceeding from many perceptions and
gather-
45 Phaedrus 249b6-cl.
ing them by calculation (logismos) into one.45
Man
is the rational animal, the animal that speaks and
73
generalizes. The degree to which a soul has seen

44 Since Hestia is a goddess but stays at home (247al-2), wingedness,

despite its loss on incarnation, is characteristic solely of the human
soul and not of the gods; cf. 246c6-d2.
the beings determines the intellectual type he
becomes once he loses his wings as he struggles
forward in the disorderly squadrons of the gods.
There are nine of these types. So far, the horses
have no function except to thwart the possibility
of complete wisdom for any soul. Now comes
the
wrinkle. The wings of the soul do not convey the
soul straight up; instead, the horizontal motion of
the horses interferes with such an ascent. A reso-
lution of the two motions leads to a skewed
ascent.
This skewed ascent attaches the souls to the train
of eleven Olympian gods, who do not care for
the
army that follows them but do not interfere with
their following. Two things, then, constitute the
human being, mind and soul; in most cases there
is a lack of coincidence between one’s Olympian
soul and one’s intellectual capacity or talent.
What
one is good at is usually not the same as one’s
own complete good. This disparity can be so
great
that one chooses, after the first incorporation,
to be a beast in any cycle afterwards: the desire
for
completeness overwhelms the necessary incom-
pleteness of mind.46 One’s Olympian soul makes
for one’s in principle being a whole; one’s
partial
vision of the beings, from which one’s own soul
46 Republic 620a2-c3.
makes one diverge, can never be completed. As
the
wholeness of soul stands opposed to the limitless
75
divisibility of art, so the way to understanding is
the obstacle to understanding.47
Socrates bridges the gap between soul and
mind through the beautiful. The beautiful has the
unique privilege of showing itself in likenesses
to
itself; no other being, neither justice, moderation,
nor any other virtue of soul, discloses itself as
vividly as the beautiful in its images. The visibly
beautiful triggers a reminder of the truly
beautiful;
the shape that the visibly beautiful takes is that
of
a god: the beloved appears as an Olympian god
in
conformity with the nature of the soul of the
lover.
Each lover fashions the beloved into a statue of
his
own soul and worships it as if it were a god.48 He
completes his own soul in the beloved. This
completion occurs for the following reason. The
expression »love at first sight« indicates how the
lover becomes a lover; but in order to get the
beloved to share this experience, he must
translate
his vision into a speech. The lover must go
beyond
his initial experience and universalize it; he can
remain true to his vision only if he stays tongue-
tied, but as soon as he tries to convey what he
feels
48 Phaedrus 251al-7; 252d5-el.
he alters his feeling for the sake of gathering the

77
47 That the way is the obstacle is already implied in Parmenides’ pic-
ture of himself on his chariot. It is striking that Parmenides himself
says that thumos was the driving force behind his journey, but
when
Plato represents him he has Parmenides, in borrowing the image of
an aged horse from Ibycus, which is about to compete once more
in a chariot race, speak of his »being compelled to go into eros«
(Parmenides 136e8-137a4).
beloved into his experience. Poetry and song are
the usual vehicles of this transformation. One
can
express it by way of two puns: the verb to love
(erari) looks like the verb to see (horan), and the
accusative of eros (erota) is identical in form and
almost in sound to the imperative of the verb to
ask questions (erota).49 The mind, as the capac-
ity to collect a manifold of perceptions into one,
serves to conceive of the species that will be in-
telligible and persuasive to the beloved. Now the
speech of the lover looks to the beloved as an
enhanced version of himself, but it is in fact an
enhanced version of the lover which the beloved
is
summoned to behold. If the lover succeeds in
inducing in the beloved through speech what he
himself did not undergo in speech, the beloved
falls in love. Socrates says: »He is in love, but he
is
at a loss with what; and he neither knows what
he
has experienced nor can he point it out, but just
as
if he were to receive a disease of the eyes from
another he cannot speak of its ground, but just as
in a mirror he sees himself in the lover without
being aware of it.«50 The eros of the beloved is
the
experience of self-motion, and the condition for
self-motion is self-ignorance. One moves toward
49 Laws 837c4-5; Cratylus 398c7-d8.
oneself in the guise of another that is simultane-
50 Phaedrus 255d3-6.
ously the other in the guise of oneself.
What, then, of the horses? How do they fit
into this account? One of these horses is white,
79
perfectly proportioned, and obedient to the con-
trol of the charioteer; the other is black, mis-
shapen, and obstreperous. It has the snub nose of
Socrates.51 The black horse is nothing but
Socrates’
eros, the white horse is the product of Socrates’
erotic art and represents the pairing of the
beloved
with the lover. The wing of the lover extends
over
the beloved and as a result their eros becomes
jointly winged (homopteros).52 The white horse is
the beautiful projection of the black horse onto
another and corresponds to Socrates’ first
speech,
which with its perfectly ordered form comes out
of Socrates the lover who has disguised himself
as
the nonlover or the beloved. It is in this case the
beautiful Phaedrus with whom Phaedrus the be-
loved can fall in love and be induced to turn to
philosophy.53 Socrates’ two speeches are thus
real-
ly a single speech in which the second speech
has
absorbed the first speech into itself and shown it
for what it is. Socrates has thus given a general
account of his erotic art; it consists in the
uncanny
capacity to figure out the nature of the soul of his
51 Phaedrus 253c7-e5.
interlocutor and contrive in accordance with it
52 Phaedrus 256el.
that
53 Phaedrus 257bl-6.completes it as it turns the soul to
form that
the desire to understand what is truly intelligible.
The myth of the Phaedrus is Socrates’ account of
himself and his action. It does not apply to
anyone 81
else. It is the showing forth of the circumstantial
action in its philosophical logos. It shows that
the ugliness of Socrates and the beauty of his
speeches necessarily belong together. Alcibiades
thought they could be pulled apart, for he failed
to understand the connection between the lowly
arts Socrates discussed and the lofty visions he
devised.54
Phaedrus had initiated the topic of the Sym-
posium, the praise of the god Eros, by asking why
no poet or prose writer had ever adequately
praised him. As always a beloved and never a
lover, he was puzzled as to what was in it for the
lover, or what made the lover so enthusiastic
about
a form of slavery that, if there were not gods,
could benefit only the beloved. Socrates answers
the second question in the Symposium - the bene-
fit accrues solely to the lover - and he answers
the
first question in the Phaedrus. The god Eros is
nothing but the manifold of human erotic natures
insofar as they are severally idealized by the
lover
and foisted onto the beloved, but Socrates
himself,
with his Protean nature, does not fit into any sin-
gle type. He has no white horse; rather, always
needy and always perplexed, without any trace in
him of the goddess Hestia who never leaves
home,55 he is immune from illusions, hopes, and

54 Symposium 215a6-b3; 221d7-222al. When Socrates was very

55 Euthyphro 3a7-8; Symposium
young, Parmenides advised 203dl.
him that he could not become philo-
sophic until he could put together no less than separate according
to human opinion the good, the beautiful, and the just, on the
one hand, and, on the other, hair, mud, and dirt, and the way to do
so lay through man (Parmenides 130b7-e4).
83
ideals, and is eros itself united with mind. In his
analysis of his double speech, to which he
ascribes
a bilateral symmetry, Socrates assigns the left
side
to himself; and, somewhat awkwardly, he leaves
it
syntactically bereft, without the particle it needs
to
contrast it with the right side.56 Socrates is
always
the other of the other. He has usurped the role of
the poets and become the fabricator of human
wholes through which he can lead his young
friends to philosophy. In this sense, one charge
against Socrates, as he himself reports it, would
be true: he is a maker of gods.57 Plato merely
con-
tinues Socrates’ erotic art in written form. The
dia-
logues are meant to replace the Olympian gods,
56 Phaedrus 265e3-bl. Once the white and black horses are combined
to in this way, the charioteer becomes inseparable from the pair, and
there is no chariot. In the case of the gods, however, they are
whom,
detach-
as Herodotus says, Homer and Hesiod
distributed
57
able from their
the
Euthyphro 3a8-b4.
horsesseveral honors,
and the chariot arts, and shapes,
(247e4-6).
but the dialogues
58 Herodotus 2.53.2. are of a far greater number,
variety,
59 Socrates and Plato share in a strange duality. It is a duality that
andlends
enchantment.58 They are so many white
itself to a twofold interpretation. It is taken to be either a two that
horses,
appears to be one - Socrates the moralist and logic-chopper and
Plato the poet and philosopher - or a one that is two. The first inter-
eachpretation
one is of whichtheleads
the mythical, second theastray as The
dialectical. it second
leadsis
revealed59
upwards. in Socrates’ second speech of the Phaedrus and Diotima’s
first account of eros as the »between« (metaxu) and philosophy.
The
first is revealed in its apparent independence in Socrates’ first
speech
in the Phaedrus and Diotima’s second account of eros as
pederasty, in which she implies that the beautiful itself is a
phantom
illusion {phantasthesetai, Symposium 211a5).
85
 Chicago and
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Lon-
don, The University of Chicago Press,
1989, IX-238.
The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy. Plato’s »Gorgias« and
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Herodote. (Gnomon, 1986, 546-547.)
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’Ερως, ’Επιθυμία, and Φιλίαίη Plato
Author(s): Drew A. Hyland
Source: Phronesis, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1968), pp. 32-46
 Έρως, Επιθυμία, (Hid Φιλία W PldtO
DREW A. HYLAND

“The encomium proper is preceded by a preliminary dialectical discussion with

Agathon, the object of which is to clear the ground of some popular misconcep-
tions of the nature of Eros. The notion of Eros, it is shown, is equivalent to that
of desire (Ιρως = τό έπιθυμουν) ... a quality, not a person."
Bury, R. G. The Symposium of Plato, page
XXXVI-XXXVII, in a discussion of Socrates'
speech.

“The subject of conversation (in the Lysis) is friendship (φιλία). But behind
this word, it is clear, as will be briefly sketched, hides the more powerful Eros...
There is hardly any terminological distinction between love and friendship,
so that, first, desire is said to wish that of which it is in want, and then that the
congenial be the object of 'love, friendship, and desire' (του οίκέιου 6 τε "Ερως καί
ή φιλία καί ή έπιθυμία τυγχάνει ούσα, 221 Ε)."
Friediander, Paul, Plato, An Introduction,
page 50-51.

t is the purpose of this essay to take some first steps toward dis-
I pelling the popular conception, exemplified by the two above
quotations, that there is little or no difference in Plato's dialogues
between the three important terms Έρως, έπιθυμία, and φιλία.1 I
say “first steps" because the vast number of significant occurrences
of these terms in the dialogues makes it impossible to give an ex-
haustive treatment in one short paper. Consequently, I propose to
do the following: first, I shall elicit the relevant distinctions between
these terms, and the basis for the distinctions, by a careful examination
of two significant passages, Symposium 200a-201b, and Lysis 221-222.
I shall attempt to show therein that although indeed these terms
have an important connection with each other, nevertheless there 1
1
D. N. Levin, “Some Observations Concerning Plato's Lysis”, (presented at a
meeting of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, Amherst, Massachusetts,
August 17, 1964), notes several different positions taken on the controversy
(see especially pages 12-18 including footnotes), and he himself seems to come
out in favor of some distinction at least between Έρως and φιλία (pages 15-17)
However, since the distinction in question is not the central theme of his essay,
he does not offer decisive evidence for his view. I propose to do so in this essay.

32
are distinct and significant differences. I shall then consider several
relevant passages from other dialogues in which I find the distinctions
I draw supported. My claim is not, indeed cannot be, that Plato always
consistently distinguishes the terms in question, that he never uses
them interchangeably. To do so would necessitate a consideration of
every occurrence of one or more of these terms in the dialogues.
Besides, there are undoubtedly contexts in which such subtle distinc-
tions are entirely irrelevant to the point being made. In such cases,
need we doubt the sincerity or the wisdom of Socrates' words in the
Theaetetus that “To use words and phrases in an easy-going way
without scrutinizing them too seriously is not, in general, a mark of
ill breeding; on the contrary there is something lowbred in being too
precise.”1 2 * Rather my more cautious claim will be that in at least
several important passages where the distinctions would be relevant,
Plato maintains them consistently. My suspicion is that this con-
sistency is maintained more broadly; but this cannot be proved in a
short paper. Finally, I shall offer a few suggestions as to possible
philosophic consequences that would derive from a realization of
these differences.
Let me begin with the discussion between Socrates and Agathon at
Symposium 200a-201b. Socrates is concerned to show Agathon that
Έρως is always directed, that is, it is always Έρως of something and
not “in itself," and also that it is always of something which it lacks.
I shall be concerned not so much with the establishing of these points
as with the careful and distinct use of the terms in question. Let me
first arrange the order of the argument, with special emphasis on the
interchange of the relevant terms, then comment on the way in
which the argument develops. The crucial passage begins at 200 a 2
when, having established that Έρως always has an object, Socrates
asks Agathon to remember what he thinks the object to be, and then
asks, “Does Έρως desire that of which it is Έρως?” (ό Έρως έκείνου
ο5 έστιν έρως, έπιθυμεΐ αύτοΰ ή οδ;). This establishes what I shall call
for reference step one, that desire (έπιθυμία) is a possible predicate of
Έρως.8 Έρως desires. “This thing that it desires and loves, does it
desire and love it having it or not having it?” (Πότερον έχων αύτό οδ

1
Plato, Theaetetus, 184c. Translation by F. M. Comford.
β
I do not mean to imply by the use of the term “steps" that these are necessarily
logical steps, that, say, step four follows logically from step three. I am simply
distinguishing the stages in the argument relevant to my paper.

33
έπιθυμεΐ τε καί έρα, είτε επιθυμεί τε καί έρφ, ή ούκ έχων;).4 “Probably
not having/' says Agathon. This I shall call step two, that Έρως
both desires and loves, in other words, that love is in a way self-
predicative, and that besides this it also desires.
“Consider," says Socrates, “whether, rather than probable, it is
not necessary that desire desires what it lacks, or does not desire if it
does not lack." (Σκοπεί δή, άντί του είκότος εί άνάγκη ούτως τό
έπιθυμοΰν
έπιθυμεΐν ου ενδεές έστιν, ή μή έπιθυμεΐν έάν μή ένδεές ή ;). 5 Here we
have
step three, which states only (as opposed to step two) that desire
desires what it lacks. An important element in step three then, is
that it says nothing explicitly about "Ερως. To this Agathon assents.
Socrates next enters upon some examples which both illustrate and
expand his point. The object of the examples is this: if someone who
is strong wishes to be strong, or if someone who is healthy wishes to
be healthy, what he really wishes is to continue to be strong or healthy
in the future, something which he at present lacks.6 But in the course
of these examples, a new word is introduced to express that element
of desire, namely βούλεσθαι. It may seem at first that βούλεσθαι and
έπιθυμεΐν are used interchangeably in this passage, but if this were so,
Socrates could be accused of ignoring the obvious difference that
έπιθυμεΐν is primarily, if not exclusively, a passion, whereas βούλεσθαι
has the more intellectual connotation of “wishing" or “willing." But
he does not, I think, ignore this. Thus Socrates says at 200d, “Con-
sider, then, whether whenever you say that T desire things now
present/ you mean anything else than this, that T wish to possess
the things I now have in the future also/" This suggests that the
desire for present possessions in the future somehow loses the pas-
sionate force of a present desire (έπιθυμία) so that the more intellectual
βούλομαι is appropriate. Let us call this introduction of βούλομαι to
refer to desire for future possession step four.
Socrates then switches back to “έράν" to draw his conclusion from
the examples. “But this is to love that which is not yet ready at hand
for one, nor in one's possession, the possession and preservation of
these things in future time."7 Step five seems to establish that "Ερως
4
Plato, Symposium, 200a5.
6
Ibid., 200a8.
6
Ibid., 200b8-200e.
7
Ibid., 200d8. “ούκοϋν τοΰτό γ’έστίν έκείνου έράν, δ ούπω έτοιμον αύτω έστιν ουδέ
έχει, τό είς τόν έπειτα χρόνον ταΰτα είναι αύτω σωζόμενα καί παρόντα;"

34
is also applicable to the possession of present blessings in the future
- that locution to which the verb βούλεσθαι is appropriate.
'This man and anyone else who desires," says Socrates, "desires
what is not ready at hand nor present to him, and what he does not
have, and what he is not himself and what he lacks, such are the
kinds of things of which desire and love are."8 Step six thus asserts
that both Έρως and έπιθυμία are of what one does not have, what one
is not himself, and of what one lacks.
Finally Socrates sums up the argument by establishing that Έρως
is first of something, and second, of something which one at present
lacks (άλλο τι έστιν ό Έρως πρώτον μέν τινών, έπειτα τούτων ών άν
ΙνΧεια παρη αύτω ;).9 The seventh and final step consists of dropping off
the interest in έπιθυμία and concluding exclusively concerning Έρως.
Let us now examine the argument more closely to see what dis-
tinctions develop. Step one establishes that Έρως desires, that is,
that desiring is a possible predicate of Έρως. It does not establish that
desire is the only predicate of Έρως, nor, certainly, does it even hint
that Έρως and έπιθυμία are identical, as Bury would have us believe.
Step two increases the dubiousness of Bury's hypothesis when it
adds that Έρως both desires and loves what it lacks. The only way
this could be construed as implying that Έρως and έπιθυμία are
identical would be to interpret the presence of the conjunction here
as a rather sophomoric redundancy on Plato's part. If Έρως =
έπιθυμία, then the conjunction of the two is entirely unnecessary.
A much more plausible explanation would be that by ascribing both
loving and desiring as predicates of "Ερως, having just ascribed
desiring individually, Plato is indicating to us that there is at least
some difference between them. What the difference is has as yet not
even been hinted at. We see here only the suggestion that there is a
difference.
Step three is characterized by the fact that it tells us nothing
directly about "Ερως. It does, however, tell us something about
έπιθυμία.10 It tells us that desire desires, that it is self-predicative in

8
Ibid., 200el. καί οΰτος άρα καί άλλος πας ό έπιθυμών του μή έτοιμου καί του μή
πάροντος καί δ μή έχει καί δ μή έστιν αύτδς καί οΰ ένδεής έστι, τοιαΰτ’άττα έστίν ών
ή έπιθυμία τε καί δ έρως έστίν;
• Ibid., 200e8.
10
Liddell and Scott, under “έπιθυμέω” say that “τό έπιθυμοΰν... equals έπιθυμία/*
Although this may at times be debatable, it serves the point here; step three is
about έπιθυμία, not "Ερως.

35
the same way as Έρως. Έρως and επιθυμία thus have this much in
common: they both desire. Έρως, however loves (έρα) as well, i.e.,
it too is self-predicative. One possible distinction between Έρως and
έπιθυμία now begins to emerge: they both desire, but only Έρως
has been said to love. It may be that έπιθυμία can only desire, whereas
Έρως can both desire and love. Nor ought we to be surprised that
such a difference arises. After all, έπιθυμία is characterized by Plato
in the Phaedrus as but the lowest faculty of the soul, as an unruly
monster which must be constrained, sometimes violently constrained,
by the higher faculties in order to prevent it from gaining complete
mastery over the soul,11 whereas Έρως is portrayed in the same
dialogue as divine madness, the source of inspiration to “divine
philosophy.”12 * There must, then, be some other element in Έρως in
addition to its capacity to desire, which gives it the divine status
which έπιθυμία lacks. Looking forward to the “ascent passage” of the
Symposium, the charioteer image of the Phaedrus, and even the cave
analogy of the Republic, we could well suspect that it will be some
element of rationality which will accomplish this enhancement of
Έρως. When we think of the brute desire (έπιθυμία) of which Έρως
is capable, modified by a more rational element, our thought ought
to turn to the possibilities offered by φιλία as a source of insight.
Perhaps φιλία is also involved in Έρως in a way which distinguishes
Έρως from έπιθυμία. To explore this possibility, we must turn to certain
important passages in Plato's dialogue on φιλία, the Lysis.
The Lysis is a dialogue whose ostensible concern is the nature of a
friend (φιλός) or more broadly, of friendship (φιλία).18 It might be
pointed out that the very fact that Plato wrote one dialogue on
friendship (φιλία) and two on Έρως indicates that he at least makes a
distinction between these two terms, even if his commentators do not.
What concerns us here, however, are certain illuminating statements
on the possible relationship between ’'Ερως, φιλία, and έπιθυμία. Near
the end of the dialogue, Socrates is pointing out that φιλία need not
be of what is absolutely evil or absolutely good, but possibly of
something neither evil nor good. He says at one point, “Is it possible
for one desiring and loving not to befriend (φιλεϊν) that which he
desires and loves?” (olov τε οΰν έστιν έπιθυμουντα και έρώντα τούτου

11
Plato, Phaedrus, 246 ff.
12
Ibid., 244-246.
18
See D. N. Levin, op. cit. (η. 1), pages 9-10 for a discussion of this.

36
οδ έπιθυμεΐ καί έρα μή φιλεΐν;).14 15 * To which Lysis replies, "It seems to
me not.” This sentence is most instructive, for it directly mentions
and relates the three terms in question. It suggests that it is impossible
for one desiring and loving (έπιθυμουντά καί έρώντα) not to befriend
(μή φίλε tv) its object. That is, if one both desires and loves (έπιθυμεΐ
καί έρ$), he must also befriend (φιλεΐ) as well. Now, we would hardly
want to say that if one simply desired, he would also befriend. Επιθυ-
μία, as the lower passion, would hardly deserve such a close association
with the more rational φιλία. The question as to whether one who
loves (έρέ*) also befriends (φιλεΐ) is more difficult, but probably con-
tains the crux of our problem. I offer the following suggestion: it
begins to look as though φιλία must be more closely associated with
Έρως than with επιθυμία. A hierarchy begins to emerge, with επιθυ-
μία at the bottom and φιλία at the top, and these two terms mediated,
as it were, by Έρως, which contains elements of both. The criterion
of this hierarchy clearly is involved with the degree of rationality
implicit in the terms. Επιθυμία, the lower passion, contains virtually
no rationality. In fact, it is a constant hindrance to reason, as we learn
in the Phaedrus.115 Έρως, as we learn from Diotima’s revelation,
contains a considerable element of reason or deliberative ability. It
acts as the mediator between gods and men.1® In its mythical pre-
sentation as the son of Poros and Penia, it is described as ”... plotting
after beautiful things and good things, being manly and energetic
and impetuous, a clever hunter, always weaving plots, desirous of
thoughtfulness, inventive, a philosopher throughout its life...”.17
Moreover, in the famous “ascent passage”,18 we learn that as the
degree of reason in Έρως increases, whereby one turns his attention
to increasingly higher objects of love, Έρως becomes transformed,
in its highest manifestation, into φιλία, indeed the φιλία for σοφία,

14
Plato, Lysis, 221b. I have adopted "to befriend" for "φιλεΐν", because it
seemed the most plausible way to maintain the connection between φιλεΐν and
φιλία (friendship). However, it is in fact an inadequate translation, because it
fails to bring out the subtlety of the distinction between φιλεΐν, and έραν in this
sentence. The point is that φιλεΐν has less έπιθυμία in it than does έραν. But "to
befriend" is too weak. Both έραν and φιλεΐν should really be translated "to love"
with the former understood to be somewhat stronger than the latter.
15
Plato, Phaedrus, 247b, and elsewhere.
14
Plato, Symposium, 202e.
17
Ibid., 203b-204, not to mention that in this description Έρως is the veritable
image of Socrates.
18
Ibid., 210-212b.

37
37
or philosophy. Φιλία, then, is Έρως modified by an increased degree
of rationality. At the risk of being capricious we could say that the
highest pursuit of man is not "erosophy” but "philosophy” because
by the time man reaches his highest condition, the erotic drive which
started him on his way has been modified, but not sublimated, by
an increased rationality, so that it becomes a φιλία for wisdom. In
fact, it is precisely this increased degree of rationality which has
enabled man to settle his erotic drive on its most proper and highest
object, wisdom itself. To hold such a view is not, of course, to maintain
that there is no relation whatsoever between these terms. That even
the two extremes, φιλία and επιθυμία, are somewhat related is shown
by a statement which Socrates makes shortly after the last quotation
from the Lysis, at 221 d. "Desire is the cause of friendship, and that
which desires is a friend to that which it desires, at the time when it
desires.” (ή έπιθυμία της φιλίας αιτία, καί το επιθυμούν φίλον έστίν
τούτω ού έπιθυμεΐ καί τότε δταν έπιθυμη.. .).19 Thus the desiring (τό
έπιθυμούν) becomes a friend to that which it desires in order to possess it.
This illustrates that the two terms are related but different. Again,
that έπιθυμία is the cause of friendship also indicates that at least the
extremes, φιλία and έπιθυμία are different, unless we wanted to hold
the unlikely view that φιλία is a causa sui. This is reiterated in another
way a few sentences later when Socrates argues that although we
desire what we lack, nonetheless, "Love and friendship and desire,
as it seems happens to be of what belongs to it.” (του οικείου δή, ώς
έοικεν, ό τε έρως καί ή φιλία καί ή έπιθυμία τυγχάνει ούσα).20 The fact
that all three terms are mentioned again indicates that they are
different, yet the content of the statement itself suggests another
important similarity. Although all three are of what they do not
have, their objects nonetheless are what belong to them, what is
proper to them.21
Let us now return to the order of argument in the Symposium. Step
four contains the introduction of βούλεσθαι to apply to the desire for
present possessions in the future. It is important to see that βούλεσθαι
has at least this much in common with έράν and έπιθυμειν; it too is 18

18
Plato, Lysis, 221d3.
80
Ibid., 221e3.
21
Let us remind ourselves again that to construe the ascription of the same
predicate to these terms as an indication of their identity would be a wholly
unsatisfactory procedure.

38
always of that which it lacks.22 But βούλεσθαι has the sense of deli-
beration or reasoning for what one wishes, which sense έπιθυμία lacks.
That is, the difference between the simple present desire (έπιθυμία)
and the assessment that the object is also desirable in the future (for
which βούλεσθαι is employed) is that the latter requires some element
of deliberation as to the value (or at least desirability) of the object.
At Republic 438 a ff., a passage we shall consider later, Socrates satisfies
Glaucon that an έπιθυμία like thirst, makes no value judgment as to
its object; it desires not good drink, but simply drink, βούλεσθαι,
on the other hand, suggests the deliberative or rational element
whereby we assess the object of our desire as worth having in the
future. Socrates* examples in the present passage are instructive in
this regard. His examples of things which we wish for (βουλόμεθα) in
the future are strength, health, and wealth.23 Evidence for my view
that these things require some deliberation before one seeks them
(and are not simply objects of έπιθυμία) is that these are precisely
the three examples which Glaucon uses at Republic 357 c to convince
Socrates of a “third class” of goods which require activities painful
and unpleasant in themselves (exercise, being healed, working) but
which are tolerated and considered good because of their good conse-
quences.
As step five indicates, this reasoned desire for present possessions
in the future qualifies as Έρως. “This is to love that which is not
present to one, and which he does not have...** (Όυκούν τοΰτό γ’έστίν
έκείνου έραν, δ οδπω έτοιμον αύτω έστιν ούδέ έχει...),24 This too
suggests
that the introduction of the deliberation involved in βούλεσθαι lifts
the status of the merely passionate έπιθυμία to the level of Έρως.
Again we can argue that central to the distinction between έπιθυμία
and Έρως is the presence of rationality in Έρως.
Thus, concludes Socrates in step six, both desire and love are of
what one does not have, of what one is not, and of what one lacks.
This is consistent, because as we have seen, both Έρως and έπιθυμία
desire, and one desires what one lacks. This conclusion, then, concerns
only the fundamental similarity between Έρως and έπιθυμία Socrates
does not state explicitly the difference between these terms. That
remains the enterprise of the reader.
In the summary of his discussion with Agathon, Socrates ceases
22
Plato, Symposium, 200b.
28
Ibid., 200d.
24
Ibid., 200d8.

39
mentioning both Έρως and έπιθυμία and concludes exclusively con-
cerning Έρως. This is because the stated topic of conversation is Έρως
not επιθυμία. We have learned about έπιθυμία too in this discussion,
as well as about φιλία, but the explicit purpose in the context of
the Symposium has been to determine certain things about ’Έρως.
We have learned that ’Έρως is always directed towards an object,
and that its object is always something that it lacks.
In the context of these remarks about the nature of Έρως in the
Symposium, we have seen the necessity of making a more complex
distinction between three related but different terms: έπιθυμία, Έρως,
and φιλία. Let me try to sum up in a coherent fashion the distinctions
which have so far emerged. Επιθυμία we know to be the lowest
faculty of the soul, the brute desire to possess what one lacks. Έρως
also desires, but unlike επιθυμία, which only desires, Έρως both
desires and loves. The difference between Έρως and έπιθυμία, then
must lie in this "'and loves.” I have suggested that the qualitative
difference between Έρως and έπιθυμία lies in the presence of rationality
in Έρως. In its purest form, the modification of the desire for possession
by rationality or contemplation is φιλία. The aspect of ’Έρως and
φιλία is thus a rational or contemplative aspect which is usually
accompanied by desire.
I propose now to cite several passages both in the Symposium and
in other dialogues, in which the thesis that there is a distinction
between έπιθυμία, Έρως and φιλία, and that the distinction hinges
on the presence and degree of reason in each, is borne out. At the
same time I shall begin to suggest certain philosophic consequences
which follow therefrom.
To take the “ascent passage” of the Symposium first; in that pas-
sage we are presented with the erotic ascent of a lover and potential
philosopher from the love of one beautiful body, through the love of
all physical beauty, through the love of increasingly higher objects,
to the love of the beauty of knowledge, and finally to the love of
Beauty itself. This ascent is endlessly rich with philosophic possibilities,
but we must confine ourselves here to an examination of what it can
tell us about the distinction between Έρως, έπιθυμία and φιλία.
The first thing to notice is the first step: “It is necessary” says Diotima,
“for one rightly pursuing this business to begin when he is young by
pursuing beautiful bodies, and first if he is rightly led by his leader,
he will love one body and in it he will beget beautiful speeches.”25
Ibid., 210a4.

40
We see here that although Plato begins the erotic ascent to philosophy
on a much more concrete level than many philosophers would be
willing to grant, he has still not begun at the most concrete level.
For Plato has Diotima begin this ascent at what is already a fairly
advanced stage of development; the young person in question has
already discerned the beauty of the physical body, and picked out
that quality as worthy of love. The higher level of this first step is also
indicated by the manner of generation which results; the lover will
generate not human children, or even sexual gratification, but “beauti-
ful speeches” (λόγους καλούς) in the soul of the beloved. A prior stage
of development, then, would have been an undiscerning or indiscri-
minate desire for the possession of the physical body, a desire whose
generative issue would have been sexual gratification, or at best (if
the affair were heterosexual) human children. But what else would
that desire be but έπιθυμία? This ascent is an ascent of Έρως, and
therefore does not begin with the absolutely lowest level, which would
be έπιθυμία. A complete ascent would necessitate a beginning with
pure έπιθυμία, or desire for the possession of a physical body, that is,
for sexual intercourse. Plato has given us that beginning in an earlier
ascent just prior to the present one, which was stated in terms of
the desire (έπιθυμία) for generation.2® There, the ascent began with the
έπιθυμία for procreation, which was characteristic even of beasts, and
ascended to such higher procreations as the works of Homer and
Hesiod, and the laws of Solon and Lycurgos. If we were now to juxta-
pose these two ascents, we would see that the first ascent constituted
the absolute beginning, whereas the beginning of the second ascent,
the one now in question, already represents a certain stage of deve-
lopment. And what precisely is that stage? It is the stage of dis-
criminating or reasoning capacity which our earlier analysis suggested
differentiates Έρως from έπιθυμία.
It is also worth noting that the highest stage of the earlier ascent
(of desire for procreation), laws and politics (exemplified by Solon and
Lycurgus),27 is but a middle level in the more famous ascent of the
love of beauty.28 Whatever the deeper reasons for this, it reveals
that έπιθυμία and Έρως overlap, but Έρως has higher manifestations
than does έπιθυμία, in particular the two highest steps on the philo-
sophic ascent, love of knowledge (φιλομαθία) and love of Beauty
28
Ibid., 207-210.
27
Ibid., 209d.
28
Ibid., 210c.

41
Itself (φιλοσοφία). This was indicated in our analysis by the fact that
Έρως and επιθυμία both desire - this is where they overlap - yet the
reasoning ability of which Έρως is capable makes it higher.
A look at the transitions in the erotic ascent to Beauty Itself
again shows the involvement of reason and ’Έρως. For the redirection
of one's Έρως from one step to another, for instance from the love
of one beautiful body to the love of all physical beauty, is accomplish-
ed when one realizes (έννοήσαντα)29 that the beauty of all physical
things is related. Thus the ascent of 'Έρως, the redirection of one’s
‘'Ερως on increasingly worthy objects, is possible because of the in-
creased presence of reason in Έρως.
In the last two steps of the ascent, the love of all knowledge, and
the love of Beauty Itself, one's ‘Έρως has become so imbued with
reason that it is more properly called φιλία, indeed, the φιλία for
σοφία. For in the next to the last step, the love of the beauty of all
knowledge (έπιστήμη), the aspirant is partaking “in unencumbered
philosophy" (έν φιλοσοφία άφθόνω),30 and of course, in the last step,
the glimpse of Beauty Itself, one is at the level of philosophy too.
This also supports the results of our earlier analysis; the difference
between ‘Έρως and φιλία is one of degree. And the degree in question
is the degree of reason which is present in one's ‘Έρως. Thus the
“ascent passage" is entirely consistent with the results of our earlier
analysis, both in regard to the order of the hierarchy (έπιθυμία-Έρως-
φιλία) and in regard to the principle of differentiation: the presence
and degree of reason.
My thesis also finds ample support in Plato’s other great dialogue
on Έρως, the Phaedrus. To take the “negative way" first; in the
speech of Lysias, and more importantly, in the first speech of Socrates
for which he must later offer a recantation, ‘Έρως is indeed identified
with έπιθυμία. He “defines" Έρως in this speech as “irrational desire"
(ή άνευ λόγου έπιθυμία)31 which, far from inspiring one to philosophy
as the Symposium suggests, rather prevents both the lover and his
beloved from pursuing “divine philosophy."32 It is clear throughout
these first two speeches that ‘Έρως is interpreted, and censured, as
irrational and harmful sexual lust, or έπιθυμία. This is why both speeches
advocate that one avoid relationships with lovers. Yet Socrates 19 * * *
19
Ibid., 210b.
80
Ibid., 210d6.
81
Plato, Phaedrus, 238b7.
88
Ibid., 239b.

42
insists that he make a recantation for this speech because it was a
"sin against Έρως,”88 the sort of thing one would expect to hear from
sailors who had never experienced any higher love.34 Clearly then,
this interpretation of Έρως is to be rejected.
The more positive statement of the nature and function of the
soul's Έρως in Socrates' second speech offers even stronger support
for my thesis. There the famous charioteer image is presented; the
soul is likened to a team of horses and a charioteer. The black,
ugly, unmanageable horse, it is usually agreed, represents desire, or
επιθυμία. The handsome white horse, more obedient to the orders
of the charioteer, represents spirit (θυμός). The distinction between
Έρως and επιθυμία is clear from the outset; έπιθυμία, represented by
the black horse, is the lowest and most unruly faculty of the soul, a
constant danger to its higher functions. "Ερως, however, is divine
madness which pervades the whole soul. Indeed, one crucial difference
between "Ερως and έπιθυμία is the relation of each to the charioteer,
reason. Επιθυμία, the black horse, resists and disobeys the charioteer
whenever possible.35 "Ερως, on the contrary, finds its fulfillment (in
philosophy) only when the charioteer is in proper command. Per-
vading the whole soul, Έρως contains in its nature desire, spirit, and
reason. But its fulfillment requires that the reason which is part of
its nature exhibit its presence and control over its επιθυμία.36 This
should be sufficient to show that it is only when reason is sufficiently
present and active in "Ερως that Έρως can achieve its highest mani-
festation, in philosophy. Remembering that at this highest mani-
festation, "Ερως is indeed a φιλία, we can see that this passage also is
consistent with the distinction, however slight, between "Ερως and
φιλία, a distinction of which Plato indicates he is aware at Phaedrus
255 e, where the young beloved mistakes his feelings of "Ερως for
φιλία. Thus all the distinctions which we found present in the Sym-
posium are also present in the Phaedrus; "Ερως, έπιθυμία, and φιλία
are all differentiated, and the principle of differentiation is the pre-
sence and degree of reason.
I wish now to turn briefly to the Republic where support is also
present for my view. It will be remembered that one stage in my 88

88
Ibid., 242e4.
84
Ibid., 243c5.
85
Ibid., 253e, 254a, 254c, et. al.
86
This is a constant theme throughout the speech. See especially the remark of
of Socrates at 256a8.

43
argument from the Symposium concerned the introduction of the
term "βούλεσθαι” which was to be distinguished from έπιθυμεΐν and
which pointed the way to έράν.87 88 The distinction between έπιθυμεΐν
and βούλεσθαι is indicated in the Republic at 437 b-c, where Socrates
is establishing the tripartite division of the soul. He wants to show
that desire (έπιθυμία) is one of these parts, and in so doing says,
"What then, said I, of thirst and hunger and the desires generally,
and again (my italics) willing and wishing...” (τί ούν; ήν δ’έγώ* διψην
καί πεινην καί δλως τάς έπιθυμίας καί αύ τό έθέλειν καί τό βούλεσθαι...).
My point here is that by distinguishing the desires (τάς έπιθυμίας)
from wishing (τό βούλεσθαι), indeed emphasizing the distinction by
the use of "and again” (καί αυ), we see that that distinction is held
consistently in this dialogue too.38 Again, this by way of support for
the difference between Έρως and επιθυμία, Socrates at 438 a is satis-
fying Glaucon that desire, qua desire, is only of its object, with no
further qualifications. He warns Glaucon,
"‘Let no one then,' said I, ‘disconcert us when off our guard with the objection
that everybody desires not drink but good drink (ώς ούδείς ποτοϋ έπιθυμεΐ άλλά
χρήστου ποτού) and not food but good food because all men desire good (πάντες
γάρ άρα των άγαΟών έπιθυμοΰσιν) and so if thirst is desire it would be of good
drink or of good whatsoever it is; and so similarly of other desires.’" 89

Since έπιθυμία is not to be understood as discriminating between

objects as to their goodness, it must surely be differentiated from
Έρως which in the Symposium is defined as "of the eternal possession
of the good.”40
Finally, to point to one of the so-called "earlier dialogues,” the
Charmides offers appropriate support for some of the distinctions I
have drawn.41 At Charmides 167 e, Socrates is concerned to call into
question the possibility that wisdom should have no subject matter
of its own, but rather be "the science of sciences.” To repudiate this,

87
Above, pp. 38-39.
88
On the other hand, see Republic 439a9, where Socrates uses βούλεται as virtual-
ly synonymous with έπιθυμεΐ, where the subtle distinction between them is not
important.
89
Translation is that of Paul Shorey. See also 439a-b.
40
Plato, Symposium, 206a. Notice that at Symposium 205a, Diotima, by way
of correcting Aristophanes, asserts that people will even cut off a part of them-
selves if they think it will bring them good.
41
I wish to thank David Gallop for pointing out these passages to me. The
interpretation of them presented here is of course my own responsibility. 44

44
he cites several parallel cases where, he suspects, the implausibility
will be obvious. Three of these examples are especially relevant to
the present problem, for they again indicate a consistent maintenance
of the relevant distinctions on Plato’s part. Socrates says at 167 e,
"Could there be any desire (έπιθυμία) which is not the desire of any pleasure,
but of itself and of all other desires? Certainly not. Or can you imagine a wish
(βούλησις) which wishes (βούλεται) for no good, but only for itself and all other
wishes? I should answer no. Or would you say that there is a love (έρωτα) which
is not the love of beauty, but of itself and of other loves? I should not."48

We notice first that the three terms are distinguished, supporting

the thesis of this paper. But the way in which they are distinguished,
namely, according to their objects, is also significant. The object of
έπιθυμία is pleasure. This differentiates it from Έρως both in this
dialogue and in Socrates’ speech in the Symposium. Significantly
enough, the object of ’Έρως is the Charmides is beauty (τό καλόν)
whereas that of βούλησις is the good (τό άγαθόν). In the Symposium
both Agathon and the young Socrates begin with the view that Έρως’
object is the beautiful but are corrected by Diotima, who shows that
Έρως’ true object is the good.48 Perhaps we could say that this transi-
tion was prefigured by the transition which I treated earlier44 from
έπιθυμία to Έρως, where these two terms were mediated, as it were,
by βούλεσθαι, whose object, we learn now in the Charmides, is the good.
If so, we see again the remarkable consistency with which Plato used
these important terms.
Still further, we see again that one consequence of the different
objects of έπιθυμία and βούλησις (pleasure and the good) is that
βούλησις requires, over and above the simple desire for the object,
the deliberative ability wherewith to assess that its object is good,
once again supporting the distinction drawn earlier between these
two terms.46
Such is the evidence I wish to put forward for the hierarchical
distinction between έπιθυμία, Έρως, and φιλία based on the degree
and presence of reason. Some of the consequences of this view for the
48
Translation is that of Jowett.
48
Plato, Symposium, 205-206a.
44
Above, pp. 38-39.
46
That the object of Έρως also involves this deliberative ability is supported
by a general consideration of Socrates's speech in the Symposium, but especially
by the correction mentioned above, that Έρως most proper object is really the
good.

45
Symposium, and in particular for the important “ascent passage”,
I have already noted. I would like to conclude by suggesting a far
more pervasive consequence. If Plato is indeed suggesting, as I
maintain, that reason is not merely occasionally interrelated with,
but indeed part of the very nature of ’Έρως, as opposed to desire,
then he forces us to reconsider the notion, popular in his day as it is
today, that love is necessarily and unambiguously in the realm of
the irrational. By extension he forces us to reconsider such clear-
cut distinctions in Greek thought as Nietzsche popularized between
the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Finally by lifting Έρως from the
realm of “irrational feeling,” Plato avoids the rather bizarre conse-
quence that philosophy, which is after all a species of love, would,
while standing as the champion of rationality, have its base in the
utterly, exclusively, irrational. As Nietzsche himself said in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra: “True, we love life, not because we are used to
living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness
in love. But there is always some reason in madness.”46
46
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann in The
Portable Nietzsche, Viking Press, New York, page 153.

Trinty College, Hartford, Connecticut.

46
MéthexisXÏV (2001) p. 45-71 Artículos

AMOUR, SEXUALITÉ ET BEAUTÉ CHEZ PLATON.

LA LEÇON DE DIOTIME (BANQUET20ld-2l2c)
JACQUES FOLLON

La question des rapports entre l’esprit et la chair est certainement l’une de

celles qui ont le plus intéressé ou tourmenté les philosophes, les théologiens et les
psychologues de tous les temps et de tous les lieux. Or Platon lui a donné une ré-
ponse qui peut paraître, à bien des égards, définitive. En tout cas, cette réponse a
incontestablement exercé une influence considérable sur toute la culture eu-
ropéenne,1 même si elle semble aujourd’hui quelque peu oubliée. D’une certaine
façon, on peut dire qu’on la trouve disséminée dans toute son œuvre, mais, à l’in-
térieur de celle-ci, le discours que Socrate prononce dans le Banquet est certaine-
ment le lieu où s’articulent le mieux les concepts anthropologiques fondamentaux
que sont le corps, l’âme, le désir, l’amour et le beau. C’est pourquoi nous vou-
drions “relire” ici ce discours, afin d’en rappeler, par-delà les interprétations é-
dulcorantes ou tendancieuses qu’on a pu en donner, toute la force et le véritable
sens.
Remarquons d’emblée que, dans l’économie du dialogue, le discours de So-
crate tranche singulièrement avec ceux des orateurs qui l’ont précédé. Rappelons,
en effet, que le Banquet est en fait un récit qui rapporte les éloges de l’Amour2 (ó
vEpü>ç) qu’auraient prononcés le poète Agathon et ses invités lors d’une réunion

tenue chez lui pour célébrer sa victoire dans un concours de tragédie. Au moment
où Socrate va prendre la parole, cinq éloges ont déjà été prononcés. Le premier a
été celui de Phèdre, qui a célébré l’Amour comme celui des dieux qui a “le plus
d’ancienneté, le plus de dignité, le plus d’autorité pour conduire les hommes à la
possession de la vertu et du bonheur, aussi bien dans leur vie qu’après leur
mort”.3 Mais ce dieu était pour lui exclusivement celui de l’amour homosexuel
masculin, car, quand il a parlé du bien le plus grand dont l’Amour est la source, il
a désigné clairement la honte des actions laides et l’émulation des actions belles
qu’engendre, chez les amants de cette sorte, le désir de ne pas démériter et de ne

1
Nous n’en voulons pour preuve que l’adjectif “platonique”, qui est passé dans le langage
cou-
rant pour caractériser un genre d’amour devenu un thème récurrent de la littérature occidentale.
À
noter aussi cette remarque significative de J.-J. Rousseau: “La véritable philosophie des amants
est
celle2de Platon;
Comme il durant le charme,
est envisagé ils les
ici sous n’en ont d’une
traits jamaisdivinité,
d’autre.nous
Un homme
écrivonsému ne peut
le mot, à la quitter
suite dece
phi-
la
losophe;
plupart un traducteurs,
3 des
Banq. lecteur froidavec
180b. Sauf ne peut
une le
indication souffrir” {la
majuscule.
contraire, Nouvelle
tous Héloïse,
les passages partie II, lettre
du Banquet XI, incet
cités dans Oeuvres
article
complètes,
le Paris 1964, p. 223, note).
sont dans la traduction de P. Vicaire (Paris 1992). Tous les mots soulignés dans nos citations
l’ont
évidemment été par nous.
46 Jacques Follon

pas paraître lâche au regard du partenaire. Et il a ajouté que ce sont là deux senti-
ments sans lesquels aucune cité ni aucun individu ne saurait jamais rien faire de
grand ni beau:

“S’il existait un moyen de former une cité, ou une armée, avec des amants et
leurs bien-aimés, il ne pourrait y avoir pour eux de meilleur gouvernement que
s’ils rejetaient tout ce qui est laid, et rivalisaient dans la voie de l’honneur. Et si
de tels amants combattaient au coude à coude, fussent-ils une poignée, ils pour-
raient vaincre pour ainsi dire le monde entier. Car pour un amant il serait plus in-
tolérable de quitter son rang ou de jeter les armes sous les yeux de son bien-aimé
que sous les yeux du reste de l’armée... Quant à laisser son bien-aimé, à ne pas le
secourir dans le péril, nul n’est si lâche que l’Amour, par lui-même, ne lui inspire
une divine vaillance et ne le rende égal au plus courageux de nature.”4

Comme le notent la plupart des commentateurs, ces propos ne pouvaient être

qu’une allusion au fameux “bataillon sacré” de Thèbes, qui, comme on le sait, é-
tait précisément constitué de couples d’homosexuels.5 À Phèdre a succédé Pausa-
nias, qui a distingué deux types d’amour : le vulgaire et le céleste. Le premier, a-
t-il dit, s’adresse aux femmes autant qu’aux garçons, au corps plutôt qu’à l’âme,
et à ceux des jeunes gens qui sont les moins intelligents, parce que ce que les a-
moureux de cette sorte recherchent avant tout, c’est l’assouvissement de leur pul-
sion sexuelle. Au contraire, l’amour céleste est étranger “à l’élément féminin”, il
“ignore l’impulsion brutale”, et il ne s’adresse qu’aux jeunes garçons qui ont déjà
fait preuve d’intelligence. Cette distinction faite, Pausanias s’est mis en devoir de
démontrer que les lois sur l’amour qui sont en usage à Athènes et à Sparte sont
bien meilleures que celles qui ont cours dans les autres cités. Car, au lieu de per-
mettre ou d’interdire sans discrimination toute forme d’amour homosexuel, elles
ne proscrivent justement que les amours vulgaires, qui sont inconstantes et égoïs-
tes, et en revanche elles encouragent l’amour céleste, qui vise la beauté morale et
unit les âmes dans une quête commune du savoir et de la vertu. Cela dit, Pausa-
nias a laissé la place au médecin Eryximaque, mais les propos de ce dernier, as-
sez pauvres, ne méritent pas qu’on s’y attarde. Est alors venu le tour d’Aristopha-
ne, qui a fait le récit d’avatars fabuleux qu’auraient connus les premiers hommes,
puis a fini par affirmer, lui aussi, que les amants homosexuels mâles “sont les
meilleurs des enfants et des jeunes gens, parce qu’ils sont les plus virils de na-
ture” et que, quand ils ont grandi, ils “sont les seuls à se montrer des hommes, en
s’occupant de politique”.6 Le dernier à prendre la parole avant Socrate a été Aga-
thon. Son discours de louange, qui se voulait un modèle du genre, a célébré l’A-
mour en montrant qu’il est le plus beau, le plus jeune, le plus délicat et le plus

4
Banq. 178e-179a.
5
Cf. Plutarque, Vie de Pélopidas 18.
6
Banq. 192a.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 47

gracieux de tous les dieux, et aussi qu’il est juste, tempérant, courageux et sa-
vant7 au plus haut point. Les quelques phrases qui suivent suffiront à donner une
idée du style rhétorique de son discours:

“D’inimitié c’est lui [l’Amour] qui nous vide, et d’amitié c’est lui qui nous
emplit; de toutes réunions, comme celle qui nous assemble, il est le fondateur;
dans les fêtes, dans les chœurs, dans les sacrifices, il se fait notre guide ; appor-
tant la douceur, écartant la rigueur, libéral en bienveillance, illibéral en malveil-
lance, propice aux bons, contemplé des sages, admiré des dieux, il est envié de
qui s’en voit privé, précieux à qui s’en soit comblé. Luxe, Délicatesse, Volupté,
les Grâces, la Passion, le Désir, sont ses enfants. [...] C’est notre soutien, c’est
notre sauveur par excellence. De tous les dieux, de tous les hommes, il est l’hon-
neur; c’est le guide le plus beau, le meilleur.”8

Quand on jette un regard d’ensemble sur tous ces discours, on voit très vite
que l’Amour dont ils ont fait l’éloge était essentiellement le dieu de l’amour
charnel, et même souvent de l’amour homosexuel masculin. Or, de ce point de
vue, le discours de Socrate, nous l’avons déjà dit, sera tout différent. D’ailleurs,
d’emblée, avant même de prononcer son propre éloge de l’Amour, le fils de So-
phronisque annonce qu’il va adopter un style et une méthode qui seront tout au-
tres que ceux de ses prédécesseurs. Il n’est pas inutile de citer ici des extraits du
passage où il explique cette différence, car on y retrouve les caractéristiques es-
sentielles de sa propre démarche, en tant qu’elle s’opposait radicalement à celle
des rhéteurs et des sophistes:

“Je croyais en effet, dans mon ignorance grossière, qu’on devait dire la vérité
sur chaque objet dont on fait l’éloge, que cela servait de base, et que parmi ces
vérités elles-mêmes il fallait choisir les plus belles et les disposer dans l’ordre le
plus convenable. [...] Mais ce n’était point, selon toute apparence, la bonne mé-
thode de faire l’éloge de quoi que ce soit ; il faut plutôt attribuer à l’objet les plus
grandes et les plus belles qualités possibles, qu’il les ait ou non, et quand même
ce serait faux, cela n’aurait pas d’importance. Nous avons en effet, admis d’a-
vance, à ce qu’il paraît, que chacun de nous aurait l’air de louer l’Amour, et non
pas qu’il le louerait en réalité. [...] Mais moi j’ignorais évidemment cette façon
de louer, et comme je l’ignorais, je me suis engagé devant vous à prononcer moi-
même un éloge. [...] Adieu donc ma promesse! Je ne veux plus louer de cette fa-
çon, j’en serais incapable. Pourtant, à condition de m’en tenir à la vérité, j’ac-
cepte, si vous le désirez, de prendre la parole, à ma manière et sans rivaliser avec
votre éloquence, car je ne veux pas m’exposer au ridicule.”9

7
On remarquera que ce sont là les quatre vertus cardinales de la morale grecque classique.
8
Banq. 197c-e.
9
Ibid. 198d-199b.
48 Jacques Follon

Les autres convives ayant accepté cette proposition, Socrate va pouvoir parler
à sa manière. Et, comme pour mieux souligner son effacement devant la vérité, il
se contentera, dit-il, de reproduire un discours qui n’est pas de lui, mais d’une
femme “qui était savante en ce domaine”,10 11 une certaine Diotime de Mantinée.
Nous apprendrons rapidement que ce discours a rectifié les idées fausses, et
finalement assez peu morales, qu’il se faisait lui-même (ou plutôt : qu’il dit qu’il
se faisait, car il s’agit là, bien sûr, d’un trait d’ironie) au sujet de l’Amour. Ce dis-
cours fut donc pour lui, comme ce le sera aussi pour ses auditeurs, une véritable
leçon, au double sens du terme, c’est-à-dire à la fois un enseignement et une ad-
n
monestation. Autrement dit, à tout ce beau monde d’esthètes et de mignons, So-
crate le rustre12 va bel et bien faire la morale, exactement comme Diotime - une
étrangère, une inconnue, pire: une femme! - la lui a faite, à lui Socrate, qui croy-
ait pourtant s’y connaître dans les choses de l’amour.
Nous ignorons si cette Diotime a réellement existé. Bien que Proclus ait vu en
elle une “pythagoricienne distinguée”,13 la plupart des commentateurs modernes
pensent plutôt qu’elle serait un personnage fictif inventé par Platon pour les be-
soins du dialogue.14 De toute façon, aurait-elle existé, il est peu probable qu’elle
ait professé la théorie des Formes que Platon met dans sa bouche. 15 Le discours
qu’elle est censée avoir tenu à Socrate peut être divisé en sept parties. 16 Dans les
pages qui suivent, nous donnerons d’abord un résumé de chacune de ces parties,
avec un bref commentaire soulignant l’un ou l’autre aspect du texte. Ensuite,

io
lbid. 201d.
11
Nous verrons en effet plus loin à quel point l’amour homosexuel charnel fera l’objet, de la
part
de Socrate,
12 d’une appréciation
“Je croyais en effet, dansmorale négative. grossière...".
mon ignorance
13
Proclus, In Plato. Remp. 1, 248, 25 Kroll. À l’époque moderne, cette opinion a été aussi
dé-
fendue
14 par H. Weil, Études sur l'antiquité grecque, Paris 1897, p. 43.
Cf. L. Robin, notice de Platon. Le Banquet, Paris 1992, p. XXIII; R. G. Bury, The
Symposium
of Plato, Cambridge 1973, 2e éd., p. XXXIX; F. M. Comford, “The doctrine of Eros in Plato’s
Sym-
posium ”, in The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays, Cambridge 1950, p. 68; R.
Waterfield,
Plato.
15 Symposium, Oxford 1994, p. 99 (abrégé dans les notes suivantes en Waterfield); K.
Le nom de Diotime, qui est attesté en Béotie dès le début de la période classique, peut
Dover,
être
Plato. Symposium,
compris Cambridge
comme signifiant 1980,
“honoré parp.Zeus”
137 (abrégé dans les
ou “honorant notesIl suivantes
Zeus”. en que
est possible Dover). Dans
Platon ait
les
fait
lignes
de cettequi suivent,
femme sagenous nous inspirons
et inspirée des remarques
une native deen
de Mantinée ce raison
dernierdecommentateur
la ressemblancesur du
Diotime.
nom de
cette
ville avec le terme grec pdimç, qui signifiait “devin” ou “devineresse”. De fait, il existait des
fem-
mes expertes en matière de religion: c’est ainsi que, dans le Ménon (81a), Socrate dit qu’il a
entendu
parler, non seulement d’hommes, mais aussi de femmes, qui étaient “savants dans les choses di-
vines”,
16 de même que l’on sait que la mère d’Eschine initiait à un culte à mystères mineur (cf.
Nous reprenons ici la division de Dover pp. 136-160.
Dé-
mosthène, 18, 259 sqq., cité par Dover p. 137). Enfin, on a évoqué la possibilité que Platon ait
choisi
une femme comme porte-parole de ses idées sur l’amour pour dissiper l’impression que nous
pour-
rions avoir que l’activité philosophique aurait un rapport privilégié ou exclusif avec l’amour
homo-
sexuel ou pédérastique (cf Dover p. 137).
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 49

nous tirerons un certain nombre de conclusions qui découlent de cette “lecture” et

qui nous semblent importantes pour bien comprendre les idées de Platon sur le
beau, l’amour et la sexualité, et pour dissiper, par le fait même, certains malen-
tendus tenaces à propos de sa personnalité comme de son oeuvre.

PREMIÈRE PARTIE (201D-203A): L’AMOUR COMME

INTERMÉDIAIRE ENTRE LES DIEUX ET LES HOMMES

Socrate commence par dire qu’avant de rencontrer Diotime et de s’instruire

auprès d’elle, il parlait de l’Amour comme vient d’en parler Agathon, c’est-à-dire
qu’il en parlait comme d’un grand dieu et qu’il voyait en lui l’amour du beau.
Mais la femme de Mantinée lui fit voir que l’Amour n’est ni beau ni bon.
Suivons-la dans son raisonnement. Est-ce alors que l’Amour serait laid et mau-
vais? Certes non, car dire cela, ce serait, non seulement blasphémer, mais aussi
tout simplement confondre les contraires et les contradictoires. En effet, le beau
et le laid ne sont pas des termes contradictoires, comme le sont, par exemple, la
vie et la mort; ce sont seulement des termes contraires, entre lesquels existe un
intermédiaire (μεταξύ) tout à fait semblable à celui qui existe entre la science et
l’ignorance sous la forme de l’opinion droite (ορθή δόξα). Comme on le voit, par
là Diotime établit d’emblée un rapport entre beauté et science, d’une part, et lai-
deur et ignorance, d’autre part, car la beauté, dit-elle, s’oppose à la laideur de la
même façon que la science s’oppose à l’ignorance ; et l’amour se situe entre la
beauté et la laideur de la même façon aussi que l’opinion droite se situe entre la
science et l’ignorance. En effet, l’opinion droite se distingue aussi bien de la
science (dans la mesure où l’on s’avère incapable d’en rendre raison [λόγον
δούναι, 202a3]) que de l’ignorance (car ce qui est vrai, même par hasard, ne sau-
rait se confondre avec le produit de l’ignorance).
Après ce préambule, Diotime démontre qu’en dépit de l’opinion courante (qui
était aussi celle des orateurs qui ont précédé Socrate), l’Amour n’est nullement
un dieu. Pour faire cette démonstration, elle part de la prémisse, facilement ad-
mise par Socrate, que tous les dieux sont heureux et beaux. 17 Or ceux qui sont
heureux sont évidemment ceux qui possèdent les choses belles et bonnes. Mais
l’Amour, lui, désire ces choses,parce qu'il en est dépourvu. D’où la conclusion:

17
Pour les Grecs, il était évident que les dieux étaient des bienheureux. Toutefois, la
religion po-
pulaire était tellement anthropomorphique qu’elle se représentait certains dieux comme
physique-
ment laids: c’était le cas, par exemple, d’Héphaïstos, qui était difforme, et aussi de créatures
divines
telles que les Euménides, qui étaient franchement hideuses. Mais Diotime fait ici état d’une
concep-
tion plus philosophique des dieux, sans doute déjà largement répandue à l’époque de Platon et
selon
laquelle les dieux ne pouvaient présenter aucune caractéristique négative. Il est clair, en tout cas,
que
pour Platon divinité et laideur étaient des concepts absolument incompatibles. Cf. Dover p. 139;
Waterfieîd, p. 85.
50 Jacques Follon

“Comment, dès lors, pourrait-il être un dieu, lui qui n’a part ni aux belles ni
aux bonnes choses?”.18

Cependant, poursuit Diotime, s’il n’est pas un dieu, l’Amour n’est pas non
plus un mortel. Ce qu’il est, c’est un intermédiaire (encore une fois!) entre les
immortels et les mortels, autrement dit un “démon” (δαίμων). Ce terme de
“démon” était parfois utilisé en poésie comme synonyme de “dieu” (Oeoç), 19
mais il était aussi employé pour désigner des êtres surnaturels inférieurs aux
dieux.20 C’est évidemment en ce dernier sens que Diotime l’utilise ici. Néan-
moins, précise-t-elle, l’Amour est un grand démon. En effet, son rôle est loin d’ê-
tre négligeable, en tant qu’il est précisément un intermédiaire entre les dieux et
les hommes:

“Il traduit et transmet aux dieux ce qui vient des hommes, et aux hommes ce
qui vient des dieux : d’un côté les prières et les sacrifices, de l’autre les ordres et
la rétribution des sacrifices, et comme il est à mi-chemin des uns et des autres, il
contribue à remplir l’intervalle, de manière que le Tout soit lié à lui-même. De lui
procède tout l’art divinatoire, l’art des prêtres en ce qui concerne les sacrifices,
les initiations, les incantations, tout ce qui est divination et sorcellerie. Le dieu ne
se mêle pas aux hommes, mais, grâce à ce démon, de toutes les manières, les
dieux entrent en rapport avec les hommes, leur parlent, soit dans la veille soit
dans le sommeil. L’homme savant en ces choses est un être démonique, tandis
que l’homme savant dans un autre domaine - art, métier manuel - n’est qu’un ou-
vrier”.21

18
Banq. 202d.
19
Cf. Iliade I, 222, où Athéna s’envole vers l’Olympe pour rejoindre les autres “démons”.
20
Cf Hésiode, Les travaux et les jours 122, où il est question des esprits de la race d’or, qui
er-
rent surBanq. 202e-203a. Notons qu’on lit souvent, dans les ouvrages d’histoire de la
1] la terre comme des gardiens bienveillants.

philosophie, que
le platonisme serait le type même du dualisme métaphysique, opposant le monde sensible et le
mon-
de intelligible, le corps et l’âme, l’esprit et la chair... Sans doute ces clichés ne sont-ils pas tout à
fait
faux, car on sait qu’il existe maints passages dans l’œuvre de Platon qui opposent effectivement
le
monde des Formes et celui des choses matérielles, ou bien dans lesquels il est dit que le corps est
un
tombeau ou une prison pour l’âme. Mais la notion-clé d’intermédiaire montre que pour lui
l’abîme
entre ces deux mondes n’était pas infranchissable. Or il est remarquable que ce soit VÊros, c’est-
à-
dire le désir amoureux, qui, canalisé dans la bonne direction, puisse devenir, avec la science et la
philosophie qui sont parmi ses objets, l’intermédiaire privilégié entre ces deux mondes.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 51

DEUXIÈME PARTIE (203A-204C):

NAISSANCE ET NATURE DE L’AMOUR

Diotime raconte que l’Amour fiat conçu le jour où les dieux fêtaient la nais-
sance d’Aphrodite, déesse de la beauté. Le dieu Poros (“Ressource”), qui était
ivre de nectar, entra dans le jardin de Zeus et s’y endormit. Là, Pénia (“Pauvre-
té”) coucha avec lui et conçut l’Amour.22 C’est de ces deux parents que celui-ci
tient sa nature d’être ambivalent et intermédiaire, sans cesse en train de chercher,
d’acquérir et d’inventer, mais aussi de perdre et de mourir, puis de renaître. En
effet,

“d’abord, il est toujours pauvre, et loin d’être délicat et beau comme le croi-
ent la plupart, il est rude au contraire, il est dur, il va pieds nus, il est sans gîte, il
couche toujours par terre, sur la dure, il dort à la belle étoile près des portes et sur
les chemins, car il tient de sa mère, et le besoin l’accompagne toujours. D’autre
part, à l’exemple de son père, il est à l’affût de ce qui est beau et de ce qui est
bon, il est viril, résolu, ardent, c’est un chasseur de premier ordre, il ne cesse
d’inventer des ruses; il est désireux du savoir et sait trouver les passages qui y
mènent, il emploie à philosopher tout le temps de sa vie, il est merveilleux sor-
cier, et magicien, et sophiste. Ajoutons qu’il n’est, par nature, ni mortel, ni im-
mortel. Dans la même journée tantôt il fleurit et il vit, tantôt il meurt; puis il revit
quand passent en lui les ressources qu’il doit à la nature de son père, mais ce qui
passe en lui sans cesse lui échappe; aussi l’Amour n’est-il jamais dans l’indi-
gence ni dans l’opulence.”23

Il faut se rendre compte que ce portrait de l’Amour est aussi, pour une large
part, celui de Socrate. Car on sait que celui-ci était laid,24 pauvre,25 endurant,26
souvent nu-pieds,27 mais aussi courageux,28 toujours à la recherche de beaux gar-
çons pour discuter avec eux,29 et passant le plus clair de son temps à philoso-
pher.30 En outre, Ménon, dans le dialogue qui porte son nom, accuse Socrate de

22
Dans le Contra Celsum (IV, 39), Origène identifie le jardin de Zeus au paradis, Poros à
A-
dam, et Pénia au serpent de la Genèse. On a aussi rapproché ce mythe de la conception d’Éros
des
histoires
23 bibliques
Banq. de Noé et de ses fils (Gn 9, 20-27), ainsi que de Lot et de ses filles (Gn 19,
203c-e.
30- 24
Ibid. 215b.
38). Cf.
25
Bury, The Symposium of Plato, p. 101.
Apol. 23b-c.
26
Banq. 219e-220d.
27
Ibid. 174a, 220b.
28
Ibid. 220d-221b.
29
Lysis 203a-204c; Théagès 128b; Phèdre 257a-b.
30
Apol. 29d-30b.
52 Jacques Follon

vouloir P ensorceler?1 tandis que dans les Mémorables de Xénophon (III, 11,
17), Socrate lui-même dit ironiquement à la courtisane Théodoté qu’il retient ses
disciples auprès de lui grâce à beaucoup de philtres, d’incantations et de rouets
magiques.
Poursuivant son discours, Diotime insiste d’ailleurs sur les rapports étroits qui
existent entre l’Amour et la philosophie, car, dit-elle, l’Amour “se tient entre le
savoir et l’ignorance”, au contraire des dieux proprement dits, dont aucun “ne
s’occupe à philosopher et ne désire devenir savant, car il l’est”. 31 32 En d’autres ter-
mes, pour philosopher, c’est-à-dire (au sens étymologique du mot) pour désirer la
sagesse, il ne faut pas être déjà en possession de celle-ci, comme le sont les
dieux.33 Mais il ne faut pas davantage être totalement ignorant, car l’inconvénient
majeur de l’ignorance, c’est que “n’ayant ni beauté, ni bonté, ni science, on s’en
croit suffisamment pourvu”. De fait, “quand on ne croit pas manquer d’une cho-
se, on ne la désire pas”.34
D’autre part, si l’amour est, comme la philosophie, intermédiaire entre la
science et l’ignorance, on comprend pourquoi la prétention de Socrate d’être un
expert dans les choses de l’amour n’était pas fondamentalement différente de son
habituel aveu d’ignorance. Au début du Banquet, en effet, Socrate avait déclaré à
Eryximaque, qui venait de proposer aux convives de faire chacun à son tour l’é-
loge de l’Amour: “Ce n’est pas moi qui m’y opposerai, moi qui déclare ne rien
savoir hors ce qui touche à l'amour”.35 C’était là comme un écho de ce qu’il a-
vait peut-être déjà dit à un certain Théagès: “Je ne cesse, c’est un fait, de répéter
que, précisément, je ne sais rien, hors du moins une toute petite connaissance:
celle des choses d'amour”.36 Effectivement, ce ne peut être que la reconnaissance

31
Mènon 80a.
32
Banq. 203e-204a. Cf. Phèdre 278d; Lysis 218a.
33
On songe ici, entre autres, à cette remarque de Diogène Laêrce (I, 12) à propos de
Pythagore:
“Le premier [Pythagore] s’est appelé philosophe dans ses entretiens de Sicyone avec Léon, tyran
des
Sicyoniens [...]. Il alléguait qu’aucun homme n’est sage, que la sagesse est le privilège des
dieux. A-
vant lui,
34 en effet, cette discipline s’appelait la sagesse (σοφία), et celui qui en faisait profession,
Banq. 204a (trad. Chambry). Cf Apol. 21c-e : “J’allai trouver un de ceux qui passent
s’il
pour a-
avait
voir leune âme
plus de riche
sagesseet [...]
élevée, s’appelait
(c’était sagehommes
un de nos (σοφός).politiques), et de (φιλόσοφος),
Un philosophe c’est,
l’examen auquel je au
le
con-
soumis,
traire,
de ma quelqu’un
conversationqui avec
cherche atteindre la que
lui, àl’impression sagesse”.
je retirai, Athéniens, fut à peu près celle-ci: [...]
Voilà
un homme qui est moins sage que moi. Il est possible en effet que nous ne sachions, ni l’un ni
l’autre, rien de beau ni de bon. Mais lui, il croit qu’il en sait, alors qu’il n’en sait rien, tandis que
moi, 35
tout I77d. que, en fait, je ne sais pas, pas davantage je ne crois que je sais! J’ai l’air, en
de même
Banq.
tout 36Théagès 128b. On sait que l’authenticité du Théagès est contestée, mais, comme le dit W.
cas,
K. d’être plus sage que celui-là, au moins sur un petit point, celui-ci précisément: que ce que je
ne
C. Guthrie (Socrates, Cambridge 1971, p. 79): “The Theages (...), if not written by Plato, is
savais pas, je ne croyais pas non plus le savoir!” (trad. Robin).
generally
agreed to be a production of the early fourth century by one of the Socratic circle ’’.Voir aussi
Lysis
204b-c; Ménon 76c; Phèdre 257a.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 53

de leur ignorance qui incite les philosophes, comme l’Amour lui-même, à recher-
cher la sagesse et la connaissance. Aristote devait le rappeler au début de sa Mé-
taphysique?1 En tout cas, on ne saurait souligner plus nettement les liens étroits
qui unissent amour et philosophie. La science, comme la beauté, comme aussi,
nous le verrons bientôt, rimmortalité, n’appartiennent en propre et de plein droit
qu’aux dieux, en vertu de leur nature d’êtres supérieurs. Les humains, eux, sont
seulement des êtres qui peuvent conquérir ces choses s’ils en ont le désir, mais ils
n’en sont pas possesseurs par nature.

TROISIÈME PARTIE (204C-206A): L’AMOUR EST DÉSIR

DE POSSÉDER PERPÉTUELLEMENT CE QUI EST BON

Après avoir expliqué l’origine et la nature de l’Amour, Diotime entreprend

maintenant de montrer à Socrate les avantages qu’il procure aux hommes. L’A-
mour, nous l’avons assez vu, est amour des belles choses. Mais quand on aime
les belles choses, on aime évidemment les avoir à soi. Or, demande Diotime,
qu’arrivera-t-il à celui qui possédera les belles choses? Comme Socrate se dé-
clare incapable de répondre à cette question au pied levé, elle lui propose alors
de remplacer le terme “beau” par le terme “bon”, puis elle lui demande ce qui ar-
rivera à l’homme qui possède les bonnes choses. Pour Socrate, la réponse est à
présent facile: cet homme, dit-il, sera tout simplement heureux. Car il est évident
que c’est “la possession des choses bonnes [qui] fait le bonheur des gens heu-
reux”.37 38 Une fois qu’on est arrivé à cette réponse, il est inutile de se demander à
quelle fin l’homme qui cherche le bonheur le cherche, car le bonheur est lui-
même la fin ultime, le bien suprême.39
Mais, si tous les hommes souhaitent posséder perpétuellement ce qui est bon,
“alors pourquoi, demande encore Diotime, ne disons-nous pas, de tous les hom-
mes, qu’ils aiment, s’il est vrai qu’ils aiment tous et toujours les mêmes choses?
Pourquoi disons-nous au contraire que les uns aiment et que les autres n’aiment

37
Aristote, Mètaph. I, 2, 982bl 1-19 : “ C’est, en effet, Pétonnement qui poussa, comme
au-
jourd’hui, les premiers penseurs aux spéculations philosophiques. Au début, leur étonnement
porta
sur les difficultés qui se présentaient les premières à l’esprit; puis, s’avançant ainsi peu à peu, ils
é-
tendirent leur exploration à des problèmes plus importants, tels que les phénomènes de la lune,
ceux38 Banq. 205a.
du soleil
39 et dess’est
Aristote étoiles,
sansenfin
doutelasouvenu
genèse dede l’univers.
ce passageOr
duapercevoir une difficulté
Banquet quand il a écritetaus’étonner,
début de
c’est re-
YÉ-
connaître sa propre ignorance (et c’est pourquoi même l’amour des mythes est, en quelque
thique à Nicomaque (I, 2, 1095al4-19): “Puisque toute connaissance, tout choix délibéré aspire
manière,
à
amour de la sagesse, car le mythe est un assemblage de merveilleux)” (trad. Tricot).
quelque bien, voyons [...] quel est de tous les biens réalisables celui qui est le Bien suprême. Sur
son
nom, en tout cas, la plupart des hommes sont pratiquement d’accord: c’est le bonheur, au dire de
la
foule aussi bien que des gens cultivés; tous assimilent le fait de bien vivre et de réussir au fait
d’être
heureux”.
54 Jacques Follon

pas? ”.40 C’est que nous réservons le nom d’amour à une espèce particulière d’a-
mour; et à cette espèce nous attribuons le nom du genre tout entier, tandis que
nous recourons à d’autres noms pour désigner les autres espèces, exactement
comme nous appelons “poésie” une espèce particulière de la poésie au sens large,
laquelle se confond tout simplement avec la création en général. 41 Ainsi, de
même que d’ordinaire nous ne donnons pas le nom de poètes à tous les créateurs
(qu’ils soient des artistes ou de simples artisans), mais seulement à ceux qui font
de la prosodie, de même on ne qualifie généralement pas d’amoureux ceux qui
ont la passion de l’argent (χρηματισμός), de la gymnastique (φιλογυμναστια)
ou de la sagesse (φιλοσοφία). Pourtant, en règle générale, “tout désir (πάσα
επιθυμία42) de ce qui est bon, du bonheur, est pour tout le monde le très puissant
Amour, l'Amour perfide”.43 Et Diotime d’ajouter une remarque qui est en fait,
nonobstant l’anachronisme évident, une allusion très claire au discours qu’Aristo-
phane a prononcé tout à l’heure chez Agathon:

“Il y a bien aussi une théorie [...] selon laquelle chercher la moitié de soi-
même, c’est aimer. Mais selon ma théorie à moi, il n’est d’amour ni de la moitié
ni du tout, si l’objet, mon ami, n’est point bon de quelque manière, car les gens
acceptent de se faire couper les pieds ou les mains quand ces parties d’eux-
mêmes leur semblent mauvaises. Je ne crois pas en effet que chacun s’attache à
ce qui lui appartient, à moins que soit appelé bon ce qui nous est propre, ce qui
est à nous, et mauvais ce qui nous est étranger. Car les hommes n’aiment rien
d’autre que ce qui est bon”.44

Bref, conclut Diotime, l’Amour est, pour tous les hommes, le désir de possé-
der ce qui est bon, et même le désir de le posséder toujours, c’est-à-dire pour l’é-
ternité, car on ne désire certainement pas être heureux seulement pour quelque
temps.

40
Banq. 205a-b.
41
En grec, le terme ποιησις, qui signifiait originellement “création”, avait pris le sens
particu-
lier de “poésie”, de la même façon qu’en français le mot “artiste”, qui signifiait originellement
une
personne
42 pratiquant
Platon emploieunaussi
“art”, c’est-à-dire
souvent un επιθυμεί»,
le verbe qui signifie
métier ou une technique“désirer”, “ressentir
quelconque, a finilepar
désir
être
ré-
de”.
servé43aux peintres,
Banq. 205d.aux musiciens
Les et aux chanteurs.
mots soulignés “sont probablement une citation, non identifiée” (P.
Vicaire).
44
Ibid. 205d-206a.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 55

QUATRIÈME PARTIE (206B-207A): L’AMOUR EST

UN ENFANTEMENT DANS LA BEAUTÉ

Dans cette partie, Diotime établit un rapport intéressant entre l’attirance que
la beauté exerce sur nos sens et notre tendance naturelle à désirer l’immortalité
(à0ava(riaç èmOupeîl·’, 207a), et elle le fait d’abord en associant étroitement
l’union sexuelle entre l’homme et la femme à la procréation: “quand nous avons
atteint un certain âge, dit-elle, notre nature ne peut engendrer dans la laideur, elle
ne le peut que dans la beauté”.45 En effet, il faut qu’une personne nous attire phy-
siquement pour que nous ayons vraiment envie d’avoir avec elle des rapports
sexuels. Or la fin naturelle de ces rapports n’est autre que la procréation, qui est
pour les mortels une manière d’arriver à l’immortalité. Diotime va même jusqu’à
dire que “l’union de l’homme et de la femme est un enfantement”.46 À ce propos,
des commentateurs modernes ont remarqué que, dans cette partie du discours de
Diotime, plus précisément en 206c-e, Platon utilise, certainement à dessein, un
vocabulaire qui peut s’appliquer aussi bien à l’acte sexuel qu’à l’accouchement: 47

“Aussi, quand l’être fécond s’approche du beau, il sent une joie, et sous le
charme il se dilate, et il enfante, et il procrée. Mais quand il s’approche du laid, il
devient sombre et chagrin, il se contracte, il se détourne, il se replie sur soi, il ne
procrée pas et, continuant de porter son fruit, il souffre. D’où, chez l’être fécond
et déjà gonflé de sève, le transport violent qui le pousse vers la beauté, car celui
qui possède cette beauté est délivré de la grande souffrance de l’enfantement.” 48

En effet, la dilatation de l’être fécond qui s’approche du beau évoque aussi

bien l’ouverture du col de la matrice lors d’un accouchement que la turgescence
des organes génitaux masculins ou féminins répondant à l’excitation sexuelle. De
même, la sève dont est gonflé cet être fait penser à la semence de l’homme - et
peut-être aussi à celle de la femme, car beaucoup d’Anciens croyaient qu’au mo-
ment de l’orgasme, la femme émettait, comme l’homme, une sorte de liquide sé-
minal nécessaire pour la conception.49 En même temps, les propos de Diotime
laissent entendre clairement qu’elle est parfaitement consciente de ce que, dans
les rapports sexuels, la plupart des êtres humains ne cherchent que la jouissance,
bien que celle-ci ne soit pas la finalité naturelle de ces rapports. En effet, dans la
Grèce antique, comme dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, bien souvent les gens espé-
raient et même essayaient que leur coït ne soit pas suivi d’une grossesse. De plus,

45
Ibid. 206c.
46
Ibid.
47
Cf. Waterfield pp. 86-87; Dover p. 147.
41
Banq. 206d-e.
49
Aristote cite et réfute longuement cette opinion dans le De generatione animalium 1, 17,
721b
8-10; 19, 727a25 sqq. Voir aussi Lucrèce, De nat. rer. IV, 1222, 1240, 1250 sqq.
56 Jacques Fol Ion

nous avons vu que l’amour homosexuel (masculin ou féminin,50 mais infécond

dans les deux cas!) y était largement répandu.
Or Diotime dit que, dans l’union de l’homme et de la femme qui est un enfan-
tement, il faut voir “quelque chose de divin”.51 C’est là sous-entendre assez clai-
rement que les autres formes de rapports sexuels, en particulier les rapports ho-
mosexuels, n’ont rien de divin, justement parce que, ne visant pas à la procréa-
tion, ils ne sont pas naturels. D’ailleurs, un peu plus loin, 52 elle déclarera que
c’est en quelque sorte par une ruse de la nature que les hommes et les femmes
sont portés à s’unir sexuellement, car, dans leur désir de faire l’amour, les êtres
humains sont, autant que les animaux, poussés par des forces dont ils ne sont pas
vraiment conscients.53 En outre, Diotime insiste sur la parenté étroite, pour ne pas
dire l’identité, qui existe entre Beauté,54 sexualité et Amour véritable,55 puisque
pour elle, “dans la procréation, la Beauté c’est la Parque et la Déesse de la nais-
sance”.56 La raison en est que fécondité et procréation “ne peuvent avoir lieu
dans la discordance; or il y a discordance entre la laideur et tout le divin, tandis
que le beau s’accorde avec lui”.57 Enfin, il faut noter que, quand Diotime évoque
l’être fécond qui porte un fruit et qui va enfanter, elle parle de la grossesse de cet
être, non pas comme d’un état qui serait causé par la vue de la beauté, mais, au
contraire, comme d’un état qui le pousse vers la beauté pour qu’il y trouve sa
délivrance. Plus loin (en 209b), elle dira que le jeune homme qui possède la fé-
condité de l’âme et qui, l’âge venu, ressent le désir d’enfanter, “cherche [...], de
tous les côtés, le beau pour y procréer”. Et elle ajoutera que c’est par le contact
avec cette beauté qu’il “enfante ce qu’il portait en lui depuis longtemps”. C’est
pourquoi, précise-t-elle ici, à strictement parler, l’Amour n’est pas amour du beau
(contrairement à ce qu’elle avait pourtant dit elle-même un peu plus haut58), mais
plutôt “amour de la procréation et de l’enfantement dans le beau”.59 En conclu-
sion, ce que l’être fécond selon le corps ou selon l’esprit désire foncièrement, ce

50
Dans leurs discours, Phèdre, Pausanias et Agathon ont essentiellement parlé, il est vrai, de
l’a-
mour homosexuel masculin. Mais, dans le sien, Aristophane a aussi évoqué le lesbianisme, en
par- 51 Banq. 206c. Archiloque (fr. 196 A 15) qualifiait déjà le coït vaginal comme une “chose
lant des “petites amies des dames” (Banq. 191e).
di-
vine 52
” (θβΐον
Banq. χρήμα),
207a-c. par opposition aux autres formes de contact sexuel (Cf. Dover p. 148).
53
Cf. Dover p. 147.
54
Suivant la plupart des traducteurs (Robin, Chambry, Boutang, Vicaire, Jaccottet..), nous
met-
tons ici
55 une majuscule à “Beauté”, parce que Diotime en parle dans ce passage comme d’une
Nous entendons par là l’amour procréateur.
déesse.
56
Banq. 206d. Le Déesse de la naissance, Ilithyie (Είλαθυια), présidait aux accouchements,
lors desquels une ou plusieurs Parques (déesses du destin) étaient aussi présentes pour sceller
l’ave-
nir du57nouveau-né.
Banq. 206c-d.
58
En 204a.
59
Banq. 206e.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 57

n’est rien d’autre que d’enfanter ce qu’il porte en lui et d’être ainsi délivré du
fardeau de son fruit, la beauté n’étant, en quelque sorte, que Venvironnement
dans lequel cet enfantement ou cette délivrance peut avoir lieu. Ou encore, pour
le dire d’une phrase, c’est bien le désir qui est premier, la beauté ne venant
qu’ensuite.

CINQUIÈME PARTIE (207A-208B):

L’IMMORTALITÉ PAR REMPLACEMENT

De ce que tous les animaux sont plongés dans un état étrange quand ils sont
pris par l’envie de procréer, de ce que, aussi, ils sont tous travaillés par l’amour
comme par une maladie quand ils désirent s’accoupler et nourrir leur progéniture
(puisqu’ils sont prêts à se battre et même à sacrifier leur vie pour elle), de ce que,
enfin, ils font cela, non par calcul, comme cela peut être le cas chez les hommes,
mais par un instinct tout à fait naturel, Diotime tire la conclusion que cet état
s’explique par le même principe, qui fait que la nature mortelle “cherche, dans la
mesure de ses moyens à perpétuer son existence et à être immortelle”. Or,
précise-t-elle, “elle ne le peut qu’en engendrant, c’est-à-dire en laissant toujours
un être nouveau qui prend la place de l’ancien”.60 Prolongeant cette pensée, la
femme de Mantinée remarque alors que ce processus de naissance et de mort per-
pétuelles affecte tout être vivant jusque dans le cours même de son existence,
dans la mesure où cet être se renouvelle continuellement, non seulement “dans
ses cheveux, sa chair, ses os, son sang et tout son corps”,61 mais aussi dans ces
choses de l’âme que sont “dispositions, caractères, opinions, désirs, plaisirs, cha-
grins, craintes”,62 et même connaissances. Et de conclure:

“C’est ainsi que tout être mortel se conserve, non qu’il soit jamais exactement
le même, comme l’être divin, mais du fait que ce qui se retire et vieillit laisse la
place à un être neuf, qui ressemble à ce qu’il était lui-même. Voilà par quel
moyen [...] le mortel participe à l’immortalité, dans son corps et dans tout le
reste; pour l’immortel, il en est différemment.”63

Cette façon de parler de Diotime a fait dire à certains commentateurs qu’au

moment de la rédaction du Banquet, Platon ne croyait pas à l’immortalité de l’â-
me, alors que c’est une doctrine qu’il défend ailleurs dans son œuvre, notamment
dans le Phédon, le Ménon et le Phèdre. Il faudrait alors comprendre que l’ex-
pression “et le reste” fait nécessairement allusion à l’âme et que “ce qui est im-

60
Banq. 207d.
61
Ibid
62
Ibid 207e.
63
Ibid 208a-b.
58 Jacques Follon

mortel” désigne les dieux et les Formes, et non l’âme. Cependant, on peut répon-
dre à cela que l’emploi de l’expression vague “et le reste”, à la place des mots “et
l’âme”, auxquels on s’attendrait naturellement après les mots “le corps”, suggère
que cette expression doit désigner ici plutôt la succession des états de l’âme en
tant qu'elle est unie au corps, tandis que l’expression “pour l’immortel” doit ren-
voyer à l’âme qui existe aussi bien avant son incarnation qu’après la mort du
corps.64 Car, dans les lignes qui précèdent, Diotime a parlé de choses de l’âme
(dispositions, caractères, opinions, désirs, plaisirs, chagrins, craintes) qui sont li-
ées à son incarnation dans un corps déterminé et qui ne survivent pas à la mort de
celui-ci.

SIXIÈME PARTIE (208B-209E):

LA PROGÉNITURE IMMORTELLE

En 206c, Diotime a dit que tous les hommes étaient féconds selon le corps et
selon l’âme. À présent, elle distingue ceux qui sont féconds selon le corps seule-
ment et qui “se tournent de préférence vers les femmes”, et ceux chez qui “la fé-
condité est dans l’âme encore bien plus que dans le corps”. 65 Comme exemples
de cette fécondité de l’âme, Diotime cite les productions des poètes et des inven-
teurs, ainsi que les œuvres des législateurs. Et c’est à propos de ces gens qu’elle
revient sur l’idée, déjà émise plus haut, de la procréation dans la beauté. Or la
manière dont elle parle de cette procréation-là montre bien que Platon concevait
celui qui est fécond selon l’âme comme un homme attiré par des garçons beaux,
non seulement physiquement, mais aussi moralement et spirituellement:

“Or quand un de ces hommes, dès ses jeunes années, a la fécondité de l’âme
[...] et quand, l’âge venu, il sent le désir d’enfanter, de procréer (riKreiv Te Kai
yevvâv), il cherche lui aussi [...], de tous les côtés, le beau pour y procréer [...].
Son affection va donc aux beaux corps plutôt qu’aux laids, par cela même qu’il
est fécond et s’il y rencontre une âme belle, généreuse et bien née, il donne toute
son affection à l’une et l’autre beauté.”66

L’amour dont il est question dans ce passage est incontestablement de nature

homosexuelle, mais on remarquera aussi que, d’emblée, l’accent y est mis sur la
procréation d’œuvres intellectuelles et morales (les poèmes, les inventions tech-
niques et les lois), bien plus que sur le plaisir physique. Certes, la beauté de l’âme
qui ne s’accompagne pas de la beauté du corps n’est pas encore envisagée, mais,
plus loin (en 210b), Diotime affirmera que la beauté des âmes est bien plus pré-

64
Cf. Dover p. 149.
65
Banq. 208e-209a.
66
Ibid. 209b.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 59

cieuse que celle des corps, tandis qu’à la fin du Banquet, Alcibiade dira de So-
crate qu’il avait une âme merveilleuse à l’intérieur d’un corps très laid. En re-
vanche, dès maintenant, Diotime indique que dans une relation amoureuse de ce
genre, l’amant “sent aussitôt affluer les paroles sur la vertu (àpeTT]), sur les de-
voirs et les occupations de l’homme de bien, et il entreprend [...] d’instruire [son
aimé]”.67 Bref, cet amant se fait éducateur moral. Or c’est cela que faisait préci-
sément Socrate, quand il entamait des discussions avec de beaux garçons.
Cependant, continue Diotime, une telle relation procure “une communion
bien plus intime que celle qui consiste à avoir ensemble des enfants”, 68 elle pro-
duit aussi entre les partenaires “une affection plus solide”, enfin elle donne des
enfants plus beaux et mieux assurés de l’immortalité que ceux qui sont de forme
humaine. Comme exemples de tels enfants, la femme de Mantinée cite les œuvres
littéraires d’Homère, d’Hésiode et des autres grands poètes,69 ainsi que les lois de
Lycurgue et de Solon, sans dire, toutefois, dans quel environnement de beauté ils
produisirent leurs œuvres, mais on peut penser que cet environnement était les
sociétés vertueuses des temps anciens pour lesquelles ces poètes et cet législa-
teurs composèrent les uns leurs chants, les autres leurs lois.70

SEPTIÈME PARTIE (209E-212A):

LA MONTÉE VERS LE BEAU EN SOI

Dans cette dernière partie de son discours, Diotime décrit, au moyen du lan-
gage initiatique des mystères d’Eleusis, les différents degrés de l’initiation aux
mystères de l’Amour. Le premier degré, dit-elle, consiste à n’aimer certes qu’un
seul corps, mais essentiellement pour y enfanter les beaux discours évoqués tout
à l’heure. Le deuxième est de voir que la beauté de ce corps est pareille à celle de
n’importe quel autre beau corps et de se rendre compte que la beauté qui se
trouve dans tous les beaux corps est “une et identique”.71 La conséquence en est
que le candidat à l’initiation devient alors amoureux de tous les beaux corps et
qu’il dédaigne désormais de n’en aimer qu’un seul. Certes, cette beauté des
beaux corps n’est pas encore la Forme du Beau proprement dite, laquelle n’aura
plus rien de corporel, mais c’est déjà la forme universelle du beau sensible, qu’on
obtient en éliminant de tous les beaux corps ce qui fait leur singularité, pour n’en
conserver que ce par quoi ils se ressemblent en tant qu’ils sont beaux: la forme

67
Ibid. 209b-c (trad. Chambry).
68
Ibid. 209c.
69
Rappelons que ces grands poètes, Homère en particulier, étaient considérés par les
anciens
Grecs70 comme desp.éducateurs.
Cf. Dover 152.
71
Banq. 210b.
60 Jacques Follon

(είδος) du beau corporel.72 Le troisième degré de l'initiation consiste à voir que

la beauté des âmes est supérieure à celle des corps, “en sorte qu'une personne
dont l’âme a sa beauté sans que son charme physique ait rien d’éclatant, va suf-
fire à son amour et à ses soins”.73 Il s’agit là, bien entendu, d’une allusion à So-
crate, dont Alcibiade dira plus loin74 qu’il ressemble à ces silènes camards et ven-
tripotents, qui, une fois ouverts, laissent voir au-dedans d’eux des statuettes de
dieux. En même temps, il faut noter une évolution importante dans le récit, car la
beauté chamelle se voit à présent nettement dévalorisée au profit de la beauté
intellectuelle et morale, laquelle suffit pour attirer un amant moralement supé-
rieur, même en l’absence de tout attrait physique chez l’aimé. Que va faire, en
effet, cet amant “spirituel”? Il ne cherchera pas à coucher avec son bien-aimé,
mais “il enfantera des discours capables de rendre la jeunesse meilleure; de là il
sera nécessairement amené à considérer la beauté dans les actions et dans les lois,
et à découvrir qu’elle est toujours semblable à elle-même, en sorte que la beauté
du corps soit peu de chose à son jugement”.75 Le quatrième degré de l’initiation
revient à passer de la beauté des actions humaines à celle des sciences, ce qui a-
mène l’épopte à avoir une vue plus large du beau et à ne plus “s’attacher comme
le ferait un esclave à la beauté d’un jeune garçon, d’un homme, ou d’une seule
action - et [à] renoncer à Vesclavage qui Γαν/7// et lui fait dire des pauvretés”.76
Comment ne pas voir là une nouvelle condamnation, en termes on ne peut plus
clairs - car Socrate parle bien d’esclavage, d’avilissement, de pauvretés! -, de la
pédérastie et de l’homosexualité charnelles, mais aussi, par extension, de toute
passion exclusivement physique? Mais si, au lieu de subir cet esclavage, l’épopte
contemple l’océan immense du Beau, alors “il enfantera de beaux discours sans
nombre, magnifiques, des pensées qui naîtront dans l’élan généreux de Vamour
du savoir (φιλοσοφία), jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, affermi et grandi, il porte les yeux
vers une science unique, celle de la beauté dont je vais te parler”.77 Remarquons
que, parmi les degrés de l’initiation aux mystères de l’Amour, il y en a trois qui
correspondent assez exactement aux modes de vie traditionnellement distingués
par les philosophes anciens.78 En effet, à la vie voluptueuse (βίος απολαυστι-
κός), basée sur la recherche des biens matériels et des plaisirs sensibles, corres-
pond l’engendrement charnel d’une progéniture au sens propre; à la vie politique
(βίος πολιτικός), consacrée à la poursuite des honneurs, répond l’engendrement

72
À ce propos, en effet, Diotime parle explicitement de “la beauté qui réside en la
forme” (TO
έττ’ elbei
73
καλόν)
Banq. 210b.
(210b).
74
Ibid. 215a-b.
75
Ibid. 210c.
76
Banq. 210d.
77
Ibid.
78
Voir, entre autres, Platon, Rép. IX, 58Ic-583a; Aristote, Eth. Nie. I, 2-3; Cicéron,
Tuscul. V,
3, 7-9.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 61

spirituel des vertus morales et civiques de prudence et de justice, ainsi que des
constitutions et des lois; enfin, à la vie contemplative (βίος θεωρητικός), qui est
celle du philosophe, se rapportent évidemment l’enfantement intellectuel des dis-
cours beaux et magnifiques, ainsi que des pensées engendrées par l’amour du sa-
voir.
Cependant, comme vient de l’annoncer Diotime, le dernier degré de l’initia-
tion est constitué par l’acquisition de la science unique de la Beauté en soi, dont
elle va maintenant parler. En effet, cette Beauté, d’une nature merveilleuse, qui
est le terme de l’initiation aux mystères de l’Amour, est “une beauté qui tout d’a-
bord est étemelle, qui ne connaît ni la naissance, ni la mort, ni la croissance ni le
déclin, qui ensuite n’est pas belle par un côté et laide par un autre, qui n’est ni
belle en ce temps-ci et laide en ce temps-là, ni belle sous tel rapport et laide sous
tel autre, ni belle ici et laide ailleurs, en tant que belle pour certains et laide pour
d’autres”.79 On reconnaît là les caractéristiques de la Forme, que Platon a maintes
fois énumérées dans ses dialogues.80 Il est évident que cette beauté-là n’est plus
celle d’un corps, si beau soit-il, ni même celle d’un discours ou d’une connais-
sance, et qu’elle n’est pas non plus “située dans quelque chose d’extérieur, par
exemple dans un être vivant, dans la terre, dans le ciel, ou dans n’importe quoi
d’autre”.81 Non, cette beauté-là est celle qui existe “en elle-même et par elle-
même, éternellement jointe à elle-même par l’unicité de sa forme (είδος), et
toutes les autres choses qui sont belles participent de cette beauté de telle ma-
nière que la naissance ou la destruction des autres réalités ne l’accroît ni ne la di-
minue, elle, en rien, et ne produit aucun effet sur elle”. 82 Or, précise Diotime,
c’est bien cette beauté-là qui est le but de l’initiation aux mystères érotiques, but
vers lequel on s’élève “grâce à l’amour bien compris des jeunes gens”.83 Si cette
précision nous rappelle que l’amour “platonique” était bien de nature homo-
sexuelle ou pédérastique, elle nous montre aussi qu’aux yeux de Platon, cet a-
mour ne pouvait être légitime qu’à la condition d’être vécu au niveau spirituel, et
non au niveau sensuel où le vivaient la plupart des Grecs de son temps tels Phè-
dre ou Pausanias. En d’autres mots, il est clair que pour lui le commerce charnel
d’un homme mûr avec un adolescent ne pouvait être que l’amour mal compris
des jeunes gens. On retrouve, du reste, un dernier écho de cette condamnation
sans équivoque de l’amour physique tout à la fin du discours de Diotime, quand
elle dit que “le Beau en lui-même, simple, pur, sans mélange”, dont la contempla-
tion est le terme de l’initiation aux mystères de l’Amour, est “étranger à Y infec-
tion des chairs humaines, des couleurs, de tout fatras mortel”.84

79
Banq. 211a.
i0
Euthyphron 5d-6e; Hippias 1289d; Ménon 72c; Phédon 74a-79a; Cratyle 439c-440b.
*]Banq. 21 la-b.
n
ibid. 211b.
*3Ibid.
™Banq. 211e.
62 Jacques Follon

CONCLUSIONS

Quelles conclusions pouvons-nous tirer d’une lecture appliquée de ce texte?

Tout d’abord, il est frappant de voir que Platon y souligne l’unité, disons même
l’unicité, du désir : en effet, c’est bien un seul et même désir (eTTiGupia) qui
pousse les créatures, non seulement à s’accoupler et à engendrer une progéniture,
mais aussi, chez les hommes, à composer des poèmes, à inventer des techniques,
à légiférer pour les cités, à tenir des discours, à cultiver les sciences et, finale-
ment, à philosopher et à contempler le Beau en soi! C’est dire qu’on ne saurait
trouver, dans le Banquet, la moindre trace d’un dualisme anthropologique, qui
distinguerait entre deux désirs essentiellement différents et appartenant, l’un au
corps, l’autre à l’âme. Car, quels que soient les multiples registres où il se mani-
feste (la sexualité proprement dite, la vie familiale, l’éducation des enfants, la
littérature, les métiers, la politique, la vie morale, les sciences, la philosophie
même...), le désir humain reste en son essence, partout et toujours, désir im-
mortalité, comme l’est d’ailleurs, mais à un niveau inférieur, le désir de tous les
autres êtres vivants. À titre de comparaison, on pourrait évoquer ici le conatus
spinoziste, le vouloir-vivre de Schopenhauer, l’élan vital bergsonien ou l’instinct
de vie freudien, aussi bien que l’œuvre entière de Miguel de Unamuno. Mais ce
qui est remarquable chez Platon, c’est que le mouvement de ce désir, qui naît a-
vec l’émoi sexuel provoqué par la vision de la beauté physique et qui s’achève,
s’il est mené à terme, dans l’extase de la contemplation du Beau en soi, ne
comporte finalement aucune discontinuité : la pratique de la philosophie, qui se
trouve au terme de l’initiation érotique bien comprise, est produite par la même
libido que celle qui nous fait désirer l’étreinte sexuelle.
Au demeurant, ce qui comble cette libido, polymorphe mais unique, c’est bien
partout la beauté, laquelle est elle-même polymorphe et unique, car, s’il y a
toutes sortes de beautés - celle des corps, celle des âmes et de la pensée, celle de
la poésie et des œuvres d’art (ou d’artisanat), celle des nobles actions et des ex-
ploits héroïques, celle des lois et des constitutions, celle enfin des discours édi-
fiants -, toutes, en fin de compte, participent de la beauté par excellence, qui est
celle du Beau en soi. Cependant, si la beauté est ainsi la seule chose qui puisse
soulager la grande et universelle souffrance du désir,85 c’est finalement parce
qu’elle se confond avec le bien. En effet, pour Platon comme pour Socrate, le
beau et le bien étaient des notions parfaitement interchangeables. On le voit clai-
rement dans le Banquet, en 201c, quand Diotime pose la question: “les choses
bonnes ne sont-elles pas en même temps belles?”, et aussi en 204e, quand elle
remplace “beau” par “bon” sans soulever la moindre aucune objection de la part
de Socrate; ce qui lui permet, un peu plus loin, de définir l’amour comme désir
de ce qui est bon (205d), puis, de manière plus précise, comme désir de posséder

85
Une grande souffrance, certes, puisque Diotime la comparait aux douleurs, si intenses,
de Tac-
couchement.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 63

toujours ce qui est bon (206a).86 C’est pourquoi on peut bien comparer l’ascen-
sion, à la fois esthétique et spirituelle, vers le Beau en soi du Banquet, avec la dé-
marche, plus intellectuelle, qui conduit à la vision de la Forme du Bien au livre
VI de la République (504d-514d, surtout 511b-c). En effet, puisque les Formes
du Bien et du Beau se confondent, on peut dire que l’objet final auquel tend
l’âme est bien le même des deux côtés, mais que les voies qui y conduisent sont
quelque peu différentes, l’une suivant, pour ainsi dire, le versant affectif de l’âme
humaine, l’autre son versant rationnel, sans pour autant que ces voies soient ex-
clusives l’une de l’autre, bien au contraire. Car Diotime, on l’a vu, comptait les
sciences parmi les choses les plus belles qui soient, tandis que, dans la Répu-
blique, Socrate dit à Adimante que les opinions qui ne se fondent pas sur la
science sont laides, avant d’annoncer qu’il va exposer des choses aussi brillantes
que belles, lesquelles seront précisément les étapes de l’ascension vers la Forme
du Bien.87
Par ailleurs, Platon savait parfaitement qu’il peut y avoir un écart, et non des
moindres, entre la beauté du corps et celle de l’âme : Socrate, laid au-dehors et
beau au-dedans, en était, répétons-le, une vivante illustration. Mais sans doute
Platon n’en pensait-il pas moins que, normalement, un beau corps doit être la ma-
nifestation sensible ou matérielle d’une belle âme (cf. 209b). Un bon exemple de
cette correspondance entre beauté physique et beauté morale est le cas du jeune
Charmide, tel qu’il est présenté dans le dialogue qui porte son nom:

“Que penses-tu de ce jouvenceau, Socrate?, me dit Chéréphon, son visage est-

il assez beau? - Merveilleux, répondis-je. - Eh bien! s’il consentait à se dévêtir,
tu n’aurais plus d’yeux pour son visage, tant sa beauté est parfaite en tous points!
- Tout le monde appuya l’avis de Chéréphon. - Par Héraclès, m’écriais-je, voilà
de quoi défier tous ses rivaux, pourvu qu’il s’y ajoute encore une petite chose. -
Laquelle ?, dit Critias. - La beauté de l’âme: c’est là un mérite, mon cher Critias,
qu’on est en droit d’attendre de ceux qui appartiennent à votre maison. - Sur ce
point également, il est digne de tout éloge.”88

Cependant, la remarque que fait Socrate à propos de la “petite chose” (l’ad-

jectif est évidemment ironique) qui ne doit absolument pas manquer à Charmide
pour qu’il soit tout à fait beau, confirme aussi qu’aux yeux de Platon, il n’y avait
justement pas toujours correspondance entre la beauté du corps et celle de l’âme
(cf. Banq. 210b). Mais dans ce cas, estimait-il, c’est alors, bien sûr, la beauté de
l’âme qui prime, car elle est bien plus précieuse que celle du corps. Quand donc

86
Cette interchangeabilité du beau et du bien est aussi affirmée dans le Lysis (216d), où
Socrate
dit que pour lui “c’est le bien qui est beau”, dans le Protagoras (360d), où il remarque que les
har- 87 Rép. VI, 506c-d.
88 belles sont aussi bonnes, et dans le Timée (87c), où on lit que “tout ce qui est bon est
diesses Charmide 154d-e (trad. Croiset).
beau”.
64 Jacques Follon

il affirmait que le beau est nécessairement bien, il est clair que, par ce beau, il en-
tendait essentiellement la beauté morale et spirituelle.
Ceci nous amène à la question de la hiérarchie des désirs, et donc aussi des
beautés. En effet, tout en concevant le désir comme un genre unique, Platon n’en
estimait pas moins que ce genre comprend des espèces, différenciées par leur po-
sition sur une échelle de valeur. Cette échelle des désirs est décrite dans la
sixième et la septième partie du discours de Diotime (plus précisément en 208e-
209e et en 210a-d). Au plus bas de l’échelle, il y a, bien entendu, l’attachement
sensuel à la beauté d’un corps unique. Notons que Socrate, par la bouche de Dio-
time, ne condamne pas purement et simplement l’amour charnel ; tout ce qu’il
fait, après les éloges dithyrambiques qu’ont prononcés avant lui les Phèdre, Pau-
sanias et consorts, c’est le remettre en quelque sorte à sa place, qui est la toute
dernière dans la hiérarchie des valeurs “érotiques”. Encore cette espèce inférieure
d’amour n’est-elle légitime que si elle est ordonnée à la procréation, ce qui veut
dire qu’elle ne doit pas viser exclusivement, ni même prioritairement, à la jouis-
sance sexuelle. Nous avons vu que, pour Diotime, l’union de l’homme et de la
femme était un “enfantement” et même, en tant que tel, “quelque chose de divin”.
Nous avons vu aussi que, pour elle, le désir travaillant tous les animaux était ce-
lui de procréer, afin de perpétuer l’espèce et de s’assurer ainsi une sorte d’im-
mortalité, car “l’objet naturel de l’amour”, disait-elle, n’est autre que cette im-
mortalité (207a-c). Aussi bien Platon a-t-il toujours condamné sévèrement les
pratiques contre nature, telles que la masturbation réciproque, le coït interrompu,
les rapports homosexuels, etc. Car il savait bien que toutes ces pratiquent ne vi-
sent qu’à détourner les rapports sexuels de leur finalité naturelle, qui est la pro-
création. On en a la preuve indéniable, non seulement dans l’accent mis par Dio-
time sur la définition de l’amour comme désir naturel de procréer, mais aussi, et
plus nettement encore, dans un passage des Lois, où l’Athénien, qui est le porte-
parole de Platon, dit que, dans la cité dont ils discutent, il faudra établir une loi
prescrivant de s’en tenir, dans les relations sexuelles, à une conformité absolue
avec la nature. Ce sera une loi, précise-t-il, qui demandera

“qu’on obéisse à la nature dans l’accouplement destiné à la procréation; qu’on

ne touche pas au sexe mâle89 90 ; qu’on ne tue pas délibérément la race humaine;
qu’on ne jette pas la semence parmi les rocs et les cailloux où elle ne prendra ja-
mais racine de façon à reproduire sa propre nature91; qu’on s’abstienne enfin,
dans le champ féminin, de tout labour qui se refuse volontairement à la féconda-
tion.”92

89
Cf <t>uaei, 207c8.
90
C’est à nouveau là une condamnation sans appel de l’amour homosexuel charnel.
91
Allusion évidente à la masturbation, solitaire ou en couple.
92
Lois VIII, 838e-839a (trad. Diès). La dernière phrase vise évidemment le coït
interrompu (et
peut-être aussi la sodomie). L’attitude de Platon peut ici être rapprochée de celle de S. Augustin,
qui
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 65

Dans la cité des Lois (lesquelles devaient être celles d’une colonie destinée à
remplacer l’ancienne Magnésie), Platon n’aurait donc certainement pas toléré des
ébats amoureux visant uniquement au plaisir.93 D’ailleurs, on sait qu’il a toujours
combattu ceux qui affirmaient que le plaisir était le souverain bien ou le seul
bien. Dans le Gorgias, par exemple, c’est bien là une affirmation qu’on trouve
sur les lèvres du sophiste Calliclès, mais Socrate la critique impitoyablement. 94
Et, dans la République, il dit, sur un ton méprisant, que cette opinion est tout
juste celle du vulgaire.95 Enfin, on sait que l’essentiel du Philèbe est consacré à
combattre une telle thèse, que défendaient pourtant les Cyrénaïques, qui étaient
des “socratiques”, aussi bien qu’Eudoxe de Cnide, qui avait été l’ami et le colla-
borateur de Platon à l’Académie. C’est pourquoi, dans l’échelle des biens que
Socrate établit à la fin de ce dialogue, le plaisir ne vient qu’au cinquième et der-
nier rang, après la mesure (1er rang), la proportion et la beauté (2e rang), l’intel-

écrivait notamment ceci: “On ne doit donc se marier que pour avoir des enfants, selon ce
témoignage
de l’Apôtre: “Je veux que les veuves encore jeunes se marient” (/ Tm 5, 14). Et en cas qu’on lui
de-
mande: Pourquoi donc?, il se hâte d’ajouter: “pour qu’elles procréent des enfants et soient mères
de
famille”.” {De bono coniug. XXIV, 32 [trad. Combès]; cf. De nupt. et concupisc. XVI, 18). Et
aussi
ceci: “Si l’homme peut contenir ses sens, qu’il ne se marie pas, qu’il n’engendre pas. Mais s’il
ne
peut les contenir, qu’il se marie, c’est son plein droit, pour ne pas engendrer d’une manière
crimi-93
On peut comparer, à nouveau, l’attitude de Platon de celle de S. Augustin. Car celui-ci,
dans ou pour ne pas se livrer au pur libertinage, d’une manière plus criminelle encore.
nelle,
Cependant
le De bono coniugali (V, 5), juge sévèrement les épouses “qui, sans être adultères, contraignent
des
ce- époux, même légitimement unis, se laissent aller à ce dernier désordre. Mais c’est contre le
droit
pendant leurs maris, souvent désireux de garder la continence, à leur rendre le devoir conjugal,
et
noncontre l’honneur qu’ils emploient dans leurs relations des manœuvres anticonceptionnelles.
Onan,
pas par désir d’avoir des enfants, mais pour satisfaire l’ardeur de leur concupiscence”. Il n’est
pasfils de Juda (Gn 38, 8-10), commit ce crime et Dieu le punit de mort” {De coniug. adult. I, 12,
le
12
moins sévère envers les maris qui sont “à ce point incontinents qu’ils n’épargnent même pas
[trad.
leurs Combès]).
femmes enceintes” {ibid., VI, 5). Et il ajoute un peu plus loin (VI, 6): “L’acte conjugal [...],
quand il
a pour objet la génération, n’est pas un péché; mais quand il est accompli pour satisfaire la
concupis-
cence, entre époux bien entendu et comme gage de la fidélité conjugale, c’est un péché véniel”.
Toutefois, l’évêque d’Hippone reconnaissait, à côté de la procréation, deux autres fins au
mariage,
que Platon n’avait pas signalées: l’union spirituelle entre les époux et le remède à la
concupiscence.
Car il estimait que le mariage est un bien, “non seulement à cause de la procréation des enfants,
mais
en raison
94 de la
Gorg. société naturelle qu’il établit entre les deux sexes. [...] Les époux ont beau vieillir
495a.
en- 95
Rép. VI, 506b.
semble dans un mariage heureux et voir s’éteindre les feux ardents de l’âge, l’amour fleurit
toujours
dans leur cœur. Plus ils ont de vertu, plus vite ils ont renoncé, d’un commun accord, à leurs
relations
chamelles, non qu’ils se sentissent obligés de s’engager à ne plus user désormais de leurs droits,
mais pour mériter la gloire d’avoir pris eux-mêmes l’initiative de ce sacrifice. S’ils se sont donc
gar-
dé la fidélité, l’honneur, les égards qu’ils se devaient, leurs membres ont beau tomber dans cet
état
de langueur qui s’apparente à la mort, l’union intime de leurs âmes est d’autant plus éprouvée, et
d’autant plus tranquille que la chasteté y persévère plus sereine. Le mariage a aussi l’avantage de
ré-
duire l’incontinence juvénile de la chair, même si elle est vicieuse, à l’honorable fonction
d’engendre
des enfants. Ainsi le lien conjugal transforme en bien le mal de la concupiscence” {ibid. III, 3).
66 Jacques Follon

lect et la sagesse (3e rang), et enfin les sciences et les techniques (4e rang). 96 En-
core s’agit-il là des plaisirs purs de l’âme seule, qui sont les plaisirs procurés par
la perception des belles formes, des belles couleurs, des beaux sons et des par-
fums, ainsi que par la pratique des sciences. (Et il faut souligner que par les “bel-
les formes” Socrate entend, non pas “ce que comprendrait le vulgaire, par ex-
emple la beauté de corps vivants ou de peintures”, mais bien les lignes droites ou
circulaires et les surfaces ou les solides “qui en proviennent, à l’aide soit de
tours, soit de règles et d’équerres”.97 Bref, il s’agit des formes géométriques, de
même que les beaux sons sont “ceux qui sont doux et clairs, qui rendent une note
unique et pure”98). Quant aux plaisirs impurs et mélangés, qui sont procurés par
les sensations corporelles et où le plaisir domine sur la douleur, la brève descrip-
tion qu’en donne Socrate est plus éloquente que de longues explications:

“SOCRATE: N’est-il pas vrai aussi que, lorsque le plaisir domine dans ces sor-
tes de mélanges, la douleur qui s’y trouve à dose plus légère cause une déman-
geaison et une douce irritation, tandis que la diffusion beaucoup plus abondante
du plaisir est un excitant qui fait quelquefois sauter de joie et qui fait passer un
homme par toute sorte de couleurs, d’attitudes, de palpitations, le met entière-
ment hors de lui et lui fait pousser des cris comme un fou?
PROTARQUE: Oui, assurément.
SOCRATE: Et elle lui fait dire de lui-même, camarade, et fait dire aux autres
qu’il se meurt pour ainsi dire, tant il est charmé de ces plaisirs, et il s’y adonne
sans cesse tout entier, d’autant plus qu’il est plus débauché et plus insensé ; il les
appelle les plus grands et il tient pour l’homme le plus heureux celui qui en jouit
le plus complètement durant toute sa vie.
PROTARQUE: TU as fort bien décrit, Socrate, tout ce qui vient à l’esprit de la
plupart des hommes.”99

D’autre part, dans le Phèdre, Socrate parle de l’homme “gouverné par le dé-
sir” et “asservi à la volupté” comme d’un “esprit malade”, 100 qui est tourmenté
par l’aiguillon d’une passion irrésistible.101 De même, dans le Timée, le plaisir

96
Phil· 66a-d.
97
Ibid. 51c (trad. Diès). C’est là, toutefois, une radicalisation due sans doute à la
méfiance d’un
Platon vieillissant à l’égard de toute forme de sensualité, car on a vu que dans le Banquet il
admettait
l’amour
98 des belles formes corporelles comme une étape nécessaire dans l’ascension vers le beau
Ibid. 51d.
en 99 Ibid. 47ab (trad. Chambry). Il est évident que Socrate évoque ici les manifestations
soi.
effrénées
de la jouissance sexuelle, d’autant plus qu’au début du dialogue dont ce passage est extrait, on
nous
a dit que
100 Philèbe donnait au plaisir le nom d’Aphrodite, la déesse de la volupté amoureuse (Phil.
Phèdre 238e.
12b).101 Ibid. 240c-d.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 67

sensuel est appelé “le plus grand appât du mal”.102 Enfin, on trouve une condam-
nation plus argumentée de l’homosexualité chamelle dans la République, quand
Socrate s’adresse à Glaucon en ces termes:

“Mais réponds-moi sur ce point: entre la sagesse et l’excès du plaisir y a-t-il

quelque communauté? - Comment cela? fit-il, l’excès du plaisir, en vérité, ne
met-il pas, non moins que la douleur, l’âme hors d’elle-même? - Mais entre lui et
toute autre excellence,..? - Aucune communauté, absolument! - Et, dis-moi, en-
tre lui et la démesure ou le dérèglement? - La communauté la plus grande! - Or,
peux-tu mentionner un plaisir qui soit plus grand et plus vif que celui qui a rap-
port à l’amour charnel? - Je ne le puis, fit-il; en aucun, non plus, il n’est pire fo-
lie! - Mais la nature du droit amour consiste-t-elle à aimer, sagement aussi bien
que musicalement, ce qui est harmonieusement réglé autant que beau ? - Ah! je
crois bien ! s’écria-t-il. - Ainsi, du droit amour rien ne devra approcher qui soit
de la folie, rien non plus d’apparenté au dérèglement? - Non, cela ne devra pas
en approcher. - Ne devra donc pas approcher cet amour charnel; n’y participe-
ront non plus, ni amant ni aimé, quand c’est de la droite façon que l’un aime et
que l’autre est aimé.”103

Tout cela n’empêche pas qu’on entend souvent dire que Socrate et Platon é-
taient des homosexuels ou des pédérastes. Cet on-dit a une origine très ancienne
puisque, d’après Diogène Laërce (II, 19), Aristoxène de Tarente racontait déjà
que Socrate avait été le mignon du physicien Archélaos. Quant à Platon, toujours
selon Diogène (III, 29-32), il aurait été, au dire d’Aristippe et de quelques autres,
l’amant d’un jeune homme nommé Astre, ainsi que de Dion de Syracuse, de
Phèdre et d’Agathon. Mais quel crédit peut-on accorder à de telles sources? Rap-
pelons, par exemple, qu’Aristoxène prétendait que la totalité de la République ou
presque se trouvait déjà dans les Controverses de Protagoras!104 Certes, il est
vrai - l’analyse du discours de Socrate dans le Banquet nous l’a suffisamment
montré - que nos deux philosophes étaient attirés, comme beaucoup de Grecs de
leur époque, par les beaux garçons bien plus que par les jolies femmes. Il est vrai
aussi que Socrate avait un tempérament fort sensuel105. Et probablement était-ce
également le cas de Platon (bien que nous soyons moins renseigné sur sa psycho-
logie que sur celle de son maître). Mais il est certain que l’un comme l’autre fi-
rent tout ce qu’ils purent pour sublimer cette tendance homosexuelle, et que, dans
une large mesure, ils y réussirent. Ainsi, à la fin du Banquet (2I7a-219e), Alci-
biade raconte comment Socrate a su se dominer et résister à ses avances d’ado-
lescent pervers. Du reste, dans le Banquet de Xénophon (VIII, 23), Socrate lui-

102
77m. 69d
103
Rép. III, 402e -403b (trad. Robin).
104
Diogène Laërce III, 37.
105
Cf. Charmide 155c-e; Mênon 76c; Xénophon, Banquet VIII, 2; Cicéron, TuscuL IV,
37, 80.
68 Jacques Fol Ion

même déclare qu’il est “indigne d’un homme libre d’avoir des relations avec qui
chérit le corps de préférence à l’âme”. Enfin, dans le Phèdre, il parle de celui qui
est amoureux d’un beau garçon, mais dont l’initiation à l’amour philosophique
est ancienne ou qui a été corrompu par ses penchants sensuels, dans des termes
dont la crudité ne laisse aucun doute sur les sentiments de dégoût que Platon é-
prouvait à l’égard des pédérastes libidineux:

“Sans doute l’homme dont l’initiation n’est pas récente, ou bien qui s’est lais-
sé corrompre, ne s’élance point rapidement de ce lieu-ci vers là-bas [le monde
des Formes], vers la beauté en soi, quand sur terre il contemple ce qui en porte le
nom: aussi, loin d’élever son regard avec respect dans cette direction, il s’adonne
au plaisir, et comme un bête se met en devoir de saillir, de répandre sa semence
et, dans l’élan de sa frénésie, ne craint ni ne rougit de poursuivre un plaisir contre
nature.”106

Ce qui est qualifié sans ambages de “plaisir contre nature” (παρά φύσιν
ήδονή) est évidemment la jouissance de la relation pédérastique chamelle, et ce
que Socrate en dit ici ne fait qu’anticiper ce que répétera à plusieurs reprises l’A-
thénien des Lois.107 L’impression que Platon tolérait l’homosexualité vient sans
doute de ce qu’il considérait que la passion homosexuelle d’un adulte pour un
jeune garçon pouvait être le point de départ d’une amitié vraiment philosophique.
Encore une fois, il est évident que tout ce que Diotime dit de l’amitié philosophi-
que108 comporte de fortes connotations homosexuelles ou, plus exactement, pédé-
rastiques. Mais, après tout ce que nous venons de voir, il n’est pas moins clair
que, pour Socrate comme pour Platon, la pédérastie n’était tolérable que dans la
mesure où elle était sublimée. C’est pourquoi la sublimation paraît bien être le
maître mot de toute la philosophie platonicienne de l’amour.
Depuis Freud, en effet, ce concept issu de la théorie psychanalytique vient im-
médiatement à l’esprit de tout lecteur cultivé du Banquet.109 Aussi les théories sur
la sexualité soutenues respectivement par les Anciens et les Modernes ont-elles
été souvent comparées et même identifiées les unes aux autres.110 Dodds, par ex-

106
Phèdre 250e-251a (trad. P. Vicaire).
107
Lois I, 636b-d; VIII, 836c, 837c, et surtout 841 d: “Peut-être, s’il plaît à Dieu,
arriverions-
nous à imposer, au sujet de l’amour, cette alternative: ou personne n’osera toucher à aucune autre
personne de naissance libre que sa propre épouse, ni semer, soit avec des concubines, une
semence
d’illégitimes et de bâtards, soit, avec des mâles, en perversion de la nature, une semence infertile;
ou
bien les
108 rapports avec le sexe mâle resteront totalement interdits... Comparer avec l’interdit bien
Surtout en 209a-e et 210b-d.
connu109de la loi àmosaïque:
Voir, ce propos,“Tu
W. ne coucheras
K. C. Guthrie,pas avec unofhomme
A History comme on couche
Greek Philosophy, avec une
Cambridge
femme.
1975, tome
C’est
IV, pp.une abomination”
392-395, (Lvnous
18, 22 ; cf. Lv 20, 13).
110
Cf. F. M.dont nous
Cornford, The inspirons
Unwrittendans cette partiep.
Philosophy..., de78.
notre article.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 69

emple, estimait que Platon “vient ici très près des concepts freudiens de libido et
de sublimation”.111 Effectivement, l’auteur du Banquet savait bien que le désir est
un courant psychique qui peut être canalisé dans telle ou telle direction et que,
plus il est puissant dans l’une d’elles, plus il est faible dans les autres, comme So-
crate l’explique lumineusement dans le passage suivant de la République:

“D’un autre côté, nous savons fort bien, je suppose, que les gens fortement in-
clinés par leurs désirs vers un certain unique objet en ont, par cela même, de plus
faibles dans les autres directions, comme s’il s’agissait d’un courant dérivé dans
l’autre sens. [...] Celui-là donc, chez qui le cours des désirs coule vers les
sciences et tout ce qui est de cet ordre, ses désirs, je pense, auront pour objet le
plaisir de l’âme, rien que de l’âme, en elle-même, tandis que les désirs dont le
corps est l’instrument seraient délaissés; à condition qu’il ne fut pas une contrefa-
çon de philosophe, mais un philosophe, véritablement.”112

Ce texte nous autorise, croyons-nous, à parler effectivement de “sublimation”

chez Platon, à condition, toutefois, que l’on distingue soigneusement la manière
dont ce concept fonctionne chez lui et chez Freud. Car, comme le dit bien Gu-
thrie, pour Platon “la purification d’Éros est réalisée par un effort conscient, alors
que la sublimation freudienne est une réorientation inconsciente de pulsions tout
aussi inconscientes (parce que réprimées)”.113 Cela dit, Freud n’en pensait pas
moins, tout comme Platon, que “le monde des réalisations culturelles s’obtient
seulement en déniant aux instincts les gratifications directes qu’ils recherchent et
en utilisant l’énergie ainsi libérée sous des formes sublimées pour les tâches de
l’art et de la science”.114
Comford a noté une autre différence entre les vues de Platon et celles des mo-
dernes sur la sexualité.115 Cette différence est liée au concept d'évolution, qui do-
mine la science moderne et qui était déjà connu des philosophes présocratiques
(tel Empédocle), mais que Platon rejetait catégoriquement, à cause d’une répug-
nance pour toute forme de réduction du supérieur à l’inférieur. En effet, jamais
l’auteur du Banquet n’aurait dit, comme Freud et tant d’autres à l’époque mo-
derne, que la sexualité chamelle est l’instinct le plus fondamental inscrit dans la
nature humaine. Car c’est un instinct que les hommes ont en commun avec les
animaux, qui sont des êtres inférieurs. Or Platon estimait, avec raison, que ce qui
constitue notre essence d’homme est ce qui est propre à l’espèce humaine en tant
que telle, et non pas ce que celle-ci partage avec les autres espèces vivantes.

1,1
E. R. Dodds, Les Grecs et T irrationnel, trad. franç., Paris 1977, p. 216.
112
Rép. VI, 485d (trad. L. Robin).
113
W. K. C. Guthrie, A History..., t. IV, p. 395 (souligné par nous).
114
A. Maclntyre, art. “Freud”, in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encylopaedia of Philosophy, t.
III, Lon-
115
don 1967, p. 251.
F. M. Comford, The Unwritten Philosophy..., p. 78.
70 Jacques Fol Ion

Dans le Premier Alcibiade, Socrate montre ainsi à son jeune interlocuteur qu’un
homme n’est rien d’autre que son âme (ψυχή) et que le corps n’est jamais qu’un
instrument dont celle-ci se sert et sur lequel elle a autorité.116 Et, à l’intérieur de
cette âme, ce qui constitue l’homme en tant que créature distincte des autres ani-
maux, c’est la partie supérieure et rationnelle qu’il est le seul à posséder, les bê-
tes n’ayant que les parties rationnelle et végétative, et les plantes seulement la vé-
gétative.117 Mais Freud,118 pour sa part, ne cachait pas sa préférence pour la con-
ception aristophanesque de l’instinct érotique compris comme désir de régression
vers un état primitif. Il faut dire que, pas plus qu’Aristophane, le fondateur de la
psychanalyse n’était un philosophe, du moins au sens propre du terme, c’est-à-
dire au sens ancien (et spécialement platonicien) d’un amoureux de la sagesse.
Enfin, une troisième différence - la plus importante à nos yeux - entre la
théorie “érotique” de Platon et les morales hédonistes ou laxistes du monde ac-
tuel est que ces dernières considèrent le désir amoureux avant tout, voire exclusi-
vement, comme un désir de jouissance sexuelle, alors que Platon le voyait essen-
tiellement comme un désir d’enfantement ou de création dans la beauté, et cela
dans tous les domaines, depuis l’engendrement d’une progéniture de chair
jusqu’aux plus hautes réalisations de la philosophie, en passant par les produc-
tions de l’art, des métiers, de la poésie, de la politique, de l’éducation et des
sciences. Aux yeux de notre philosophe, le désir ayant pour objet essentiel le
plaisir des sens ne pouvait donc être, du point de vue de la nature humaine, qu’un
désir dévoyé, ravalant l’homme au rang de la bête.
Ainsi, l’immense mérite de Platon est d’avoir montré que le désir est un man-
que qui, en l’homme, ne peut être véritablement comblé que par la contempla-
tion. Sans doute d'aucuns trouveront-ils, non sans quelque raison, que chez lui
l’objet de cette contemplation était par trop intellectuel. Il est vrai que, pour le
philosophe athénien, cet objet se ramenait à la Forme intelligible du Beau, lui-
même identifié au Bien, source, pour tous les êtres, non seulement de leur intelli-
gibilité, mais encore de leur existence et de leur essence. 119 Aussi devait-il reve-
nir au christianisme de donner à cette réalité suprême un visage: celui du Ré-
dempteur, “resplendissement de la gloire de Dieu, effigie de sa substance”,120 et
donc image parfaite du Père,121 Lui-même source de toutes les perfections et ulti-
me objet d’amour pour les créatures raisonnables. Et c’est en ce sens que S. Tho-
mas d’Aquin devait écrire que,

1,6
Alcibiade 1127d-130c.
117
Cf. Tintée 69a-71a.
118
Cité par T. Gould, Platonic Love, Londres 1963, pp. 33 sqq.
119
Rép. VI, 509b.
m
He I, 3. Cf. 2 Co 4, 6.
121
Cf Jn 14,9: “Qui m'a vu a vu le Père”.
Amour, sexualité et beauté chez Platon 11

“selon saint Grégoire, la vie contemplative consiste dans la charité pour Dieu,
car l’amour de Dieu enflamme le désir de voir sa beauté. Et comme chacun se ré-
jouit quand il prend possession de ce qu'il aime, la vie contemplative s'achève
aussi dans la joie, c’est-à-dire dans le cœur, d’où jaillit l’amour.”122

Université Catholique de Louvain

122
Somme théologique II.II, q. 180, a. 1.
Plato and the Problem of Love:
On the Nature of Eros in the Symposium
D.C. Schindler

I Is love essentially autoerotic?

In his classic study published at the turn of the last century, Pierre
Rous-
selot posed what he referred to as 'the problem of love,' namely, 'Is it
possible for there to be a love that is not egoistic? And if it is possible,
what is the relationship between this pure love of the other, and the
love
of self that seems to lie at the basis of all natural tendencies?'1 Though
the question is evidently a perennial one, Rousselot investigated it spe-
cifically within the context of the concern among medieval thinkers to
honor the Christian demand that one love God more than oneself. Ac-
cording to Rousselot, there were two general notions of love in this pe-
riod, each with its own solution to the problem: on the one hand, there
was 'ecstatic love,' which interpreted love in its purest form as a violent
ex-propriation in the unconditional gift of self to the beloved. 2 On the
other hand, there was 'natural love' (l'amour physique), which insisted
that love remains essentially self-referential even in its loftiest instanc-
es, but that the notion of self could ultimately (and somewhat paradoxi-
cally) be expanded to include what one would normally recognize as

1 Pierre Rousselot, Pour l'histoire du problème de l'amour au moyen age, vol. 6 of

Beitrage
zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. Clemens Baeumker and Georg
F.
2 Ibid., 56-87, esp. 65-76
von Hertling (Muenster: Aschendorffschen Buchhandlung 1908), 1
200 D.C. Schindler

a readiness to make a sacrifice of one's own person. This latter notion

of love, which Rousselot attributed to the 'Greco-Thomist' tradition, he
deemed in the end to be the more satisfactory: for the radical selfless-
ness implied in the ecstatic conception must surrender rationality to
the extent that it denies what is clearly an undeniable principle, that it
is impossible for me to affirm something as good unless I see it in some
respect as good for me.3
Now, whatever one makes of Rousselot's assessment of the various
thinkers in his brief, but rich, treatise,4 the terms in which he frames the
issue get us to the core of this perennial problem, and thus allow us to
engage fruitfully with another question: what would Plato's response
be to 'the problem of love'? The balance of scholarship appears to tilt in
favor of Rousselot's judgment that Greek philosophy embraces a 'natu-
ral' view of love, at least as far as we can gather from the Symposium. At
first glance, there does not seem to be much room for objection. When
Diotima asks Socrates to identify the motivating reason for love, he an-
swers simply and without qualification that it is the will 'to be happy'
(εύδαίμον είναι). With approbation, Diotima gives his response the seal
of finality: that reason, she says, is ultimate (τέλος) (205a). Later, hap-
piness is characterized as making the good one's own forever. In this
respect, the defining impulse of love would be the desire for one's own
eternal fulfillment. The eudaimonistic character that thus appears to
belong essentially to Plato's conception of love has led commentators
to regard that conception as fundamentally centered on the self, or, to
use L.A. Kosman's provocative expression, human love, for Plato, is
at bottom and most properly 'auto-erotic'.5 There are some who criti-
cize Plato precisely for this self-centeredness, whether they do so in the
name of what they take to be the selflessness of Christian agape or in
the
name of the apparently self-forgetful magnanimity of, for example, Ar-

3 Rousselot cites, among others, the following text from Aquinas: 'Ex hoc . . .
aliquid
dicitur amari quod appetitus amantis se habet ad illud sicut ad suum bonum.
Ipsa
igitur habitudo vel coaptatio appetitus ad aliquid velut ad suum bonum amor
vocatur. . . . Unumquodque amamus inquantum est bonum nostrum.' In Div
4 His
Nom,
interpretation of Aquinas in particular has been substantially criticized by
Louis Geiger, Le problème de l'amour chez saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris:
c. 4,1.9. Cf. hisO.P.:
discussion of the 'irrationality' of ecstatic love: 76-80.
Vrin
1952).
5 L.A. Kosman, 'Platonic Love', in W.H. Werkmeister, ed., Facets of Plato's
Philosophy
(Assen: Van Gorcum 1976), 53-69, at 61
 Plato and the Problem of Love 201

istotelian philia. Those who wish to defend Plato against the charge of
egoism that would seem to be necessarily entailed in this conception of
love — Kosman among them — typically try to show, as Rousselot
did,
that an authentic self-love will include the generous and self-sacrificial
behavior we normally associate with love.6
What seems to be a common presupposition among the commenta-
tors on Platonic eros, regardless of whether in they end they criticize or
defend him, is that desire is essentially self-centered; this is, indeed, an
inference readily drawn from the principle cited by Rousselot, name-
ly, that one cannot perceive something as good unless one sees it in
some respect as good for oneself. In this case, goodness — understood,
it should be noted, specifically as an appetible object rather than as,
say, the predicate of a moral action — is necessarily self-referential.
This assumption seems to underlie the whole spectrum of responses to
Plato's view and positions taken on the essence of love in his thought.
Thus, for example, one attempts to eliminate desire from the highest ex-
ample of love, divine Agape,7 or one subordinates (receptive) desire to
(active) generosity in preferring Aristotle's philia to Plato's eros.8 David
Halperin betrays the same assumption, for example, when he argues
that the reason for the common dissatisfaction with Plato's view of love
is that people overlook the fact that, in the Symposium, he is talking
only about sexual love rather than other kinds.9 Another response is to
attempt to disconnect eros and desire in Plato's thought.10 Or, along
similar lines, one claims that, at the higher levels of the 'ladder of love,'
6 7 8 9 10

6 See, for example, Richard Kraut, 'Egoism, Love, and Political Office in Plato', Phi-
losophical Review 82 (1973): 330-44.
7 The best known example of this approach is Anders Nygren's enormously influ-
ential Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: The Westminster
Press
1953). See his discussion of Plato, in which he characterizes eros as 'acquisitive'
and 'egocentric': 166-81. Gerasimos Santas bases his interpretation on the same
assumption: 'Plato's Theory of Eros in the Symposium,' Nous 13 (1979): 67-75,
esp.
8 See Gregory Vlastos, 'The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,' in Platonic
69-70.
Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 19812), 3-34.
9 The judgment therefore concedes that sexual love ( eros) itself is self-centered.
See
David Halperin, 'Platonic Eros and What Men Call Love', Ancient Philosophy 5
(1985): 161-204.
10 In this case, then, desire is assumed to be self-centered. See Drew Hyland, 'Epithu-
mia, Eros, and Philia in Plato', Phronesis 13 (1968): 32-46. Joseph Cummins
presents
 202 D.C. Schindler

desire gives way to generosity — so much so that Socrates retains the

same word for love, eros, at this summit only for rhetorical purposes,
given that the charge of the evening was to speak in praise of eros. 11 Or
one concedes that the relationship to goodness is eudaimonistic, but
argues that the relationship to beauty is not so: it is not desired for its
own sake, but as a means of begetting and giving birth.12 Finally, as
mentioned above, there are some who expand desire to embrace the
sorts of activity we usually associate with generosity: but to the extent
that they call this generosity a form of 'self-love' they reveal the same
assumption, namely, that desire, even in its most generous form, is ul-
timately self-referential.13
The present essay aims to challenge the view that Platonic eros is
ego-
istic precisely by challenging this assumption. Through a discussion of
a couple of key passages in the Symposium, we intend to show that Pla-
to's conception manages to 'outwit', as it were, Rousselot's distinction
between natural and ecstatic love, so that we might best think of his as
a 'naturally ecstatic' understanding. As we will see, the account of love
that Socrates offers in the dialogue depends on a recognition that desire
is essentially, and in its most rudimentary structure, self-transcending,
and thus that, without denying its relative truth, we must therefore go
beyond the principle that one cannot affirm the goodness of something
unless it is in some respect good for oneself. If we accept this
'rereading'
of the nature of desire, which we will argue for below, we will see how
it provides a consistent way of interpreting the relationship between
eros and what Plato presents in the Symposium as its ultimate object,
namely, the wholly non-relative form of Beauty. We hope to show that
this re-reading of desire not only offers a deeply satisfying response to
the 'problem of love', but also allows in principle a way to answer the 11
12 13

a compelling critique of the attempt to dissociate desire and eros: 'Eros, Epithumia,
and Philia in Plato', Apeiron 15 (1981): 10-18.
11 R.A. Markus, 'The Dialectic of Eros in Plato's Symposium', The Downside
Review 73
(1955): 219-30. Timothy Mahoney likewise claims that eros ceases to be
egotistical
at the very highest level: 'Is Socratic eros in the Symposium Egoistic?' Apeiron
12 Harry
29 Neumann, 'Diotima's Concept of Love,' The American Journal of Philology
86.1 (1965),
(1996): 1-18.33-59; here: 37-9 (see also 41, 50). Again, the implication here is
that
because goodness is desired for its own sake, the soul's relationship to goodness
is self-centered.
13 See L.A. Kosman, 64-5.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 203

other objection that Kosman rightly identifies as among the most com-
monly raised against Plato's conception of eros: namely, that it
excludes
in principle a genuine love of individual persons for their own sakes
precisely because it is set on the acquisition of an abstract property.
A comment on methodology is in order before we begin. The pres-
ent essay does not intend to offer an interpretation of the Symposium
as a whole, but will limit itself to a consideration of a few decisive
moves made in Socrates' speech, which are most directly related to
our question. Although it is a controversial presumption, we will
talk about these ideas as representing Plato's own view of love. Ad-
mittedly, the Symposium is an especially problematic instance of a
general problem in interpreting Plato: because he does not speak in
his own voice, we can never be completely sure who, if any, among
the characters are speaking for him. The Symposium has the added
difficulty of laying out a series of relatively self-contained speeches
about love without coming to any obvious synthetic judgment re-
garding their various claims. Indeed, Plato seems in this dialogue
deliberately to wish to frustrate any attempt to 'check' the sources
by foregrounding, in the prologue, the 'second-hand' (or more accu-
rately, 'fourth' hand14) nature of the account of an evening that took
place, he writes, a long time ago (173a). Now, it may be the case that
the order of the speeches given that evening is not simply acciden-
tal, but carries philosophical significance regarding the relation of the
claims made in the speeches to one another — a possibility that is cer-
tainly strengthened by the fact that order is shown to be so important
in the evening's 'final' speech — but it would take us too far from our
specific purpose to explore this possibility.15 Instead, we will content
ourselves with a more direct observation: there are at least two plac-
es in Socrates' speech in which he explicitly 'corrects' claims made
in the speeches that immediately preceded him, namely, Socrates'
interrogation of Agathon at 199c-201c, and Diotima's comment at

14 Apollodorus recounts his prior recounting to Glaucon of a story he heard, not

from
Socrates himself, but from Aristodemus who was silently present at the discus-
sion.
15 Leo Strauss makes the interesting observation that there seems to be some
corre-
spondence between the seven parts into which Socrates' speech naturally
divides
itself, and the seven speeches that are given that evening: Leo Strauss, On
Plato's
Symposium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001), 183.
204 D.C. Schindler

205e-6a on the story that echoes Aristophanes' speech.16 If we are justi-

fied in assuming that the character of Socrates at the very least carries
a special weight for Plato, there is warrant for taking these 'correc-
tions' to be important for Plato, regardless of what he would make of
the content of the rest of the speeches or what else he himself might
want to add if he were to present, say, a systematic treatise on love. In
any event, this is what we shall assume in the present essay.17

II The intentionality of desire

When the moment comes for Socrates to present his encomium of eros,
he approaches his task in a manner that differs from his predecessors in
two basic respects: first of all, he begins with a philosophical question-
ing of the speaker who directly preceded him, and, second, rather than
relate his own speech, he gives an account of a conversation he once
had with the wise woman from Mantineia (i.e., 'Prophetville'), Diotima.
There is something common to these two differences: they both show
Socrates as something other than an 'author' of a doctrine, and in that
sense an 'authority' on love. In other words, in both respects Socrates
stands forth as one who responds to another's ideas, rather than as one
who possesses his own (which is, incidentally, a reflection of Plato's
doing the same by means of composing a dialogue on love between
other speakers at a gathering from which he himself is absent). How
can this apparent modesty be reconciled with Socrates' uncharacteristic
exclamation, when the evening's activities were first proposed, that the
only thing he would claim to have expert knowledge of (enioxaoOat) is
'erotics' (xa epoxtKa) (177e)? The very first point established in
Socrates'

16 Of course, there are clear allusions to claims made in some of the other
speeches
(e.g., 208c-d is a comment on Phaedrus' speech), but these two are the most di-
rectly related to our specific theme.
17 On the basis of the sorts of difficulties we have mentioned, Neumann argues
that
we have no reason to think any character in the dialogue represent Plato's own
view: see 34-37. There are some who interpret the Symposium as Plato's critique
of
Socrates: see, e.g., Stanley Rosen, Plato's Symposium (South Bend, IN: St.
Augus-
tine's Press 1999), 279-80; Cornford, 'The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's
Symposium',
in Gregory Vlastos, ed., Plato II: Ethics, Politics, and the Philosophy of Art and
Beauty
(New York: Doubleday 1971), 119-31 at 125-6.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 205

initial questioning of Agathon (which he claims to be a repetition of

the questions put to him by Diotima, and thus even in this case not 'his
own': see 201d), casts a brilliant, if paradoxical, light on this problem.
As we unfold the significance of this initial point, we will see that the
way in which Socrates approaches the theme of love and the content
of what he says on that theme reciprocally reflect one another, and that
the insight generated in this convergence of form and content already
contains in nuce the main thrust of what Diotima will eventually teach.
Before he is willing to give his 'own' speech, Socrates wishes to ask
some 'little' questions of Agathon, and begins with what seems to be a
painfully obvious one. Is love 'of' something or nothing, he asks
(199d)?
To illustrate what he means by the question, he points out that there are
certain things that make sense only in relation to something else: for
example, a father or mother can be such only in relation to a son or
daughter. Lest anyone misinterpret his example, Socrates immediately
clarifies that he does not intend to imply that this relationship itself is
erotic, i.e., that eros may transpire between parents and children, a no-
tion he dismisses as ridiculous (γελοίος). As off-handed as the
reference
here to incest may seem, it actually raises in a striking, though implicit,
manner what is at stake in the question being addressed. Agathon had
affirmed the age-old Greek notion that 'like is always drawn to like'
(195b), and indeed derived all of the essential properties of love from
this notion.18 But, if this principle is true without qualification, the
prac-
tice of incest would seem to be quite a natural expression of eros, since
one's offspring (or one's parents) are more directly related to one, and
thus 'like' one, than any other human beings — apart from oneself, of
course.19 In this case, the taboo on incest would turn out to be artificial,
if not altogether contra naturam, an inference that would certainly make
anyone who wishes to affirm the rootedness of nomos in physis uneasy.
18 Agathon calls the proverb a 'παλαιός λόγος'. The first appearance of this notion
in Greek literature seems to be Odyssey 17.218: ώς αίει τόν όμοΐον άγει θεός ώς
τόν
όμοΐον. Plato refers to some version of this idea in Phaedrus 240c, Republic
329a,
Lysis 214a, and Progatoras 337d. See also Aristotle, Rhetoric I 11, 1371b12-25.
19 It
Theought to be noted that Aristotle draws this inference explicitly in relation to
philia, namely, that one naturally loves oneself above all others, and then loves
attraction of similars is a basic principle in early Greek thought.
the
others that are most 'like' one (cf., Rhetoric I 11, Nicomachean Ethics IX 4). If
eros is
also taken to follow the 'like to like' principle, then autoeroticism incest, and ho-
mosexuality would represent the paradigm.
206 D.C. Schindler

Socrates' joking remark in a subtle way brings Agathon — not to men-

tion the other speakers, who all arguably share the assumption that like
is drawn to like — to face this implication.
While one might wish to adduce any number of practical reasons
for
the necessity of exogamy, Socrates introduces the foundation (which
will require further development, as we will see) of a theoretical reason
with his first observation. The obvious answer to the question he put to
Agathon is that love is always 'of' something, that is, the very notion
of 'love', like that of 'father' or 'mother', depends on what is other than
itself for its own meaning. The genitive, which expresses this depen-
dence grammatically, is so constitutive of the notion that it, rather than
the accusative, is used for the object of eros also in its verbal form.
Thus,
the act of eros is not an action upon an object (accusative) but remains
receptively related to the object (genitive) to which it is ordered, and
in this respect is itself determined by that object. We might thus say
that eros is essentially relational, or, to use a more modern term, that
it is essentially intentional. This term indicates the fact that eros is not
a self-contained entity, but that it is ordered to what is other than it, so
much so we could say that its very being lies in this dynamic movement
'beyond'. Its 'self' is its reference to what is other than itself. Socrates
reinforces the sense of this movement by associating love with desire
(έπιθυμία) (200a). As he explains, desire always and in every case re-
lates to something that is not in one's possession, but something absent,
i.e., not present (μη παρών). Desire is thus a function of need (ένδεης).
While Agathon derived all of love's properties from the principle that
like draws like, Socrates will unfold all that he says about love from the
fact that it is dependent in a decisive way on the otherness, the non-like-
ness, of its object.
Now, it is quite common to point to this observation as the ultimate
source for what one takes to be the problem with Plato's theory of love:
it is based, one says, on deficiency, and for that reason cannot but be
essentially egoistic in form, regardless of what else is said.20 But let
us note that there is an ambiguity at this stage, which will turn out to
be crucially important a little later: The presence of need prompts the
question whether it is the lack that determines the desire, and thus the
desired object, or the object of desire that first determines the desire
and
20 See, e.g., Nygren, 175-6. C.D.C. Reeve, in Love's Confusions (Cambridge, MA:
Har-
vard University Press 2005), 113-6, suggests that defining love in terms of need
leads to a conception in which the satisfaction of love entails its destruction.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 207

therefore generates the lack? As we will see in a moment, Aristophanes

embraces some form of the first possibility, while Socrates will eventu-
ally affirm the second, and they come to radically different conceptions
of eros as a result.
Before discussing this difference, which we will do below in the
next
section, let us unfold the significance of the intentionality of love
further
in the context of the dialogue. Though they may have disagreed about
the most important features of love, one thing that all of the speeches
before Socrates' had in common was that they presented love as an ob-
ject of praise. From this perspective, love acquires the status of a telos,
an
end pursued or the terminus of an appetite, and for that reason stands
as a final state of perfection, i.e., a god. Diotima, by contrast, insists
that
love is not a god but a daimon, because while a god is in possession of
all good things, a daimon, in-between the mortal and divine realms, is
in-between possession and sheer emptiness (201e-202e).21 Diotima un-
derscores the 'in-between-ness' of love with her genealogy: on the feast
of Aphrodite, Penia (Poverty) contrived to get a child by Poros
(Plenty),
who was drunk on nectar. Interestingly, it is Penia who initiates the
rela-
tionship because of her lack of resources — i.e., due to Poros' absence
to
her (διά την αυτής άποριάν) — which is consistent with the point made
above, namely, that the dynamic tension of intentionality is a result of
the absence of its object; nevertheless, she already appears to have the
'resourcefulness' to do so. Because of the day of the conception, Dioti-
ma 21says,
It islove is aDiotima
true that servant specifically
claims of beauty
love is without a share, (άμοιρος)
which she had already
in goodness and
22 love was ugly (202a), pointing in-
identified
beautyin (202d),
a basicbutway with
she had goodness.
earlier denied that The speech in praise of love
stead to its
thus becomes in intermediate
some respectcharacter. We ought
a speech thus either
in praise to assume
of love's that. her de-
object
nial of any share in goodness and beauty is exaggerated to make her point more
sharply, or that love is, as it were, an entity of a different sort, in relation to
which
the simple alternatives of beauty and ugliness do not make sense.
22 See 201d. On the general interchangeableness of goodness and beauty, see
Jacques
Follon, 'Amour, Sexualité, et Beauté Chez Platon: La Leçon de Diotime',
Méthexis
14 (2001): 45-71 at 63, fn. 86. Follon does not acknowledge that there may be
some
specific sense in which beauty and goodness differ within this general
equivalence
(using scholastic terminology, beauty seems to represent the efficient cause of
love,
while goodness represents its final cause; however, the fact that they cause love
in
a different respect does not require that beauty and goodness be different
objects,
208 D.C. Schindler

But the fact that Socrates focuses his attention away from love and
toward love's object does not mean that he is shirking the charge of
the evening, namely, to speak in praise of love. Indeed, he fulfills that
charge in a much more dramatic and complete way than his predeces-
sors. After hearing Agathon's speech, which Socrates said made him
think of Gorgias, the well-respected sophist, he said, punning, that he
worried it would have the effect of the mythical Gorgias' head, and
strike him silent as stone (198c) — i.e., make him unable to speak about
love. But his is the proverbial silence that speaks louder than words.
No doubt occasioning a good deal of rolling of eyes at the symposium,
Socrates explains his confusion about the task they were given, saying
he thought to praise something meant to speak the truth about a thing
rather than simply pronouncing beautiful phrases in its regard. We see
here a common Platonic theme, namely, the contrast between appear-
ance and reality, and the association of the latter with truth. In general,
truth can indicate the use of correct words in regard to a thing, or it can
indicate the actual showing forth of the thing itself.23 While Socrates
does remain in some sense silent about love, and speaks instead about
what love loves, he thereby makes the reality of love actually manifest:
he points toward that toward which love itself points, and in this re-
spect his speaking of what is other than love enacts love. As Kosman
puts it, Socrates thus praises love in ¿pg® rather than simply in log®.24
If
love is essentially intentional, there is no better way to demonstrate that
one knows 'erotics' than by not claiming for oneself any knowledge of
it. What seems on the surface to be a contradiction, or at least a tension,
is instead the revelation and 'making real' of a paradoxical truth. In a
word, Plato, in the Symposium, makes love actually present by releas-
ing it from the limitations of (mere) discourse — a reversal that finds
reinforcement in the real love-play that occurs after the speech between
Socrates and Alcibiades.

materially speaking), but the differentiation is not significant for the argument he
makes in his essay, nor for the one we make here.
23 Rosemary Desjardins explains the significance off the dramatic form in the Pla-
tonic dialogues for dealing with just this ambiguity, which she rightly claims to
have been a central concern for Plato. See 'Why Dialogues? Plato's Serious
Play', in
Charles Griswold, Jr., ed. Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York:
Routledge
24 Kosman, 58
1988), 110-25.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 209

James Arieti has pointed out that each of the speakers depicts Eros
in his own image:25 according to Eryximachus, for example, Eros is a
doctor, for Agathon, he is a poet, and so forth. This self-reflection in
eros seems to be especially true in relation to Socrates: as
commentators
have pointed out through the ages, the likeness between Socrates and
Eros extends even to the physical appearance; Socrates' description of
the barefooted and somewhat ugly Eros appears to be a description of
Socrates himself.26 Here we would seem to have a challenge to the
direc-
tion our discussion has been moving in thus far: the fact that the speak-
ers all present an eros fashioned in their own image could be taken to
imply that love cannot avoid ultimately being self-referential, and that
however much it may point to an 'other' beyond itself, love still cannot
help but understand that other essentially in terms of itself. This fact
would seem to confirm the suggestion that Platonic love is ultimately,
and inescapably, 'auto-erotic'. But this interpretation would overlook
an essential ambiguity. To say that the description of love bears a strik-
ing similarity to the one describing it does not necessarily mean that
one fashions love in one's own image; it can also mean that one fash-
ions oneself in love's own image, i.e., expresses love's nature in oneself.
And if love is intentional, and thus defined by that to which it points,
then one best images love by conforming oneself to the self-transcend-
ing dynamic that constitutes it. In contrast to the static presentation of
love as an image of oneself and at the same time as an object of praise
— here we would have the essence of 'auto-eroticism' — Socrates dra-
matically becomes love by seeking what love seeks, which lies in a cru-
cial respect beyond what he (Socrates/Eros) is. There is a mirroring of
self and other in both cases, but the order of the reflection is fundamen-
tally different.

25 James Arieti, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield 1991), 107.
26 Cf., Rosen, Symposium, 233. The most direct indication of this identification, of
course, is Alcibiades' unexpected contribution to the evening's discussions.
While
all the previous speeches had been about eros, his was instead about the person
of Socrates. At that moment, according to Günther Figal, Socrates 'wird zur
Eros':
Sokrates (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck 1995), 97.
 210 D.C. Schindler

III The absoluteness of love's object

To say that love is intentional is to say that it is defined by its object.

Diotima identifies the 'something' of that which love is always of as
the beautiful (203c), or the good (206a). At this point, we face what is
perhaps the most decisive question in interpreting the meaning of eros
in the Symposium: how are we to understand the goodness of the good
to which Platonic eros is ordered? The answer to this question will
most clearly reveal the nature of eros. Is the proper object of love good
in an essentially relative sense, i.e., good because it corresponds to the
desire of that which loves it, or is it rather good in an absolute sense,
i.e., independently of any particular (and therefore relative) purpose
it serves?
At first glance, it would seem that we ought to rule out the latter
possibility because of the incoherence it seems to generate. Goodness is
already a relational term; to call something good that was not good for
anything at all in particular or in relation to some particular thing does
not seem to make any sense. We recall that this is a criticism that Aris-
totle raises presumably with respect to Plato's Idea of the Good, such as
Plato presents it in the Republic — namely, that it is senseless to speak
of goodness simply as such; it is intelligible only to speak of the variety
of particular goods.27 Kosman, who affirms the intentionality of love
in terms similar to our characterization above, nevertheless rejects an
absolute sense of goodness or beauty for reasons similar to Aristotle's:
goodness and beauty, he says, are 'incomplete predicates': 'To say of
something that it is good must always be relative to some description
under which the entity said to be good is specified.'28 Likewise, Terry
Penner argues in a different context that it is impossible for me to take
something as good unless it is good for me.29 He thus echoes the gen-
eral position articulated with great force a hundred years ago by Pierre
Rousselot, as we noted above. The truth of the judgment here cannot
be denied. On the other hand, we may still ask whether the judgment
expresses the whole truth. It is to be noted that Kosman makes his point
27 28 29

27 Aristotle, however, rejects pure equivocity among these goods and affirms instead
an analogy. See Nicomachean Ethics, I 6, 1096b20-9.
28 Kosman, 61
29 See Terry Penner, 'The Forms, the Form of the Good, and the Desire for Good, in
Plato's Republic', Modern Schoolman 80 (2003): 9-233, esp. 96.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 211

as a formal philosophical principle rather than drawing it from any par-

ticular text in Plato. As we shall see, what Plato himself writes points
to a much more complex, and I will argue, adequate, position. When
Aristotle criticizes a non-relative, i.e., absolute, notion of goodness, he
is after all criticizing the Platonic view, which ought at least to discour-
age us from assuming that Plato would simply agree with his criticism,
as Kosman implies, and basing our interpretation of the Symposium on
that assumption if there is another possibility that would allow us in
fact to make sense of what Plato does say in the dialogue.
There are two things in the Symposium that would incline one to
inter-
pret love's object in an essentially relative sense, and so we enter into
the
issue by addressing them in turn. First, we have Aristophanes' speech,
which presents the unforgettable myth of Zeus' division of the human
spheroids as punishment for their overweening complacency, with its
implication that eros is our search for wholeness, our attempt to reunite
with our missing half. The other is Socrates' clear response to Diotima's
questioning, that we desire goodness because of the happiness it brings
once possessed. To say that we desire the good because it makes us hap-
py is certainly to that extent an essentially self-referential conception of
goodness. In order to judge whether this is a proper inference to draw
from Socrates' and Diotima's exchange, it will be helpful to ask first
what
Plato seems to make of the view of love Aristophanes presents.
There is a priori no reason to assume that Plato rejects the full
content
of Aristophanes' story simply because it does not come out of Socrates'
mouth. On the other hand, Diotima, in Socrates' speech, does regis-
ter a significant qualification of the key point made, which, as a direct
philosophical comment on that speech, we ought to accord a certain
weight:
“Now there is a certain story," she said, “according to which lovers are
those people who seek their other halves. But according to my story,
a lover does not seek the half or the whole, unless, my friend, it turns
out to be good as well. I say this because people are even willing to
cut off their own arms and legs if they think they are diseased. I don't
think an individual takes joy in what belongs to him personally unless
by 'belonging to me' he means 'good' and by 'belonging to another'
he means 'bad.' That's because what everyone loves is really nothing
other than the good." (205e-206a)

If one were to ask, in relation to Aristophanes' story, what accounts for

love's desire, the answer is plain: we love something because it belongs
 212 D.C. Schindler

to us, because it is related to us in some way: it is οικείος. Its relativity

to
us, in other words, is precisely what constitutes its goodness (and there-
fore its forming the object of eros). The intentional character of eros we
discussed above would already require a modification of this claim, but
Diotima's observation here brings out a further problem with it. There
are things that belong to us that we would rather not have, e.g., a dis-
eased limb. In this case, the mere relation to self cannot be said to be a
sufficient cause of goodness, nor, for the same reason, a sufficient
cause
of love. Aristophanes' assertion that Eros' principal business is 'leading
[us] to what is our own' (εις το οίκείον άγων: 193d) is therefore inad-
equate, at least to this extent. It may be difficult to see what meaning
goodness has if it is taken in an absolute sense, without any relativity,
but what critics of this absoluteness overlook is that goodness likewise
becomes meaningless the moment it is reduced to relativity. On the one
hand, absoluteness without relativity dissolves into unintelligibility (in
addition to the fact that it ignores the dialogue's repeated claim that we
love something because it makes us happy), but, on the other hand,
mere
relativity, i.e., relativity without any absoluteness — if we may put it
thus
for the moment — likewise fails to account for the existence of eros. Is
there some way to affirm absoluteness and relativity at the same time?
We see an opening in this direction already in Diotima's
observation
in the passage above, which becomes even clearer in the brief exchange
that follows it. A thing that belongs to a person does not bring joy to
him
unless it is good. Diotima goes on to affirm in an absolute (απλώς) sense
that goodness is the object of love: 'Can we simply say [άπλοΰν] that
people love the good?' (206a). But then: 'Shouldn't we add [ού προθετ-
έον] that, in loving it, they want the good to be theirs?' Diotima is not
rejecting the relational aspect of goodness; instead, we could say that
she is simply rooting its relationality in its absoluteness, and thereby
reversing the direction, so to speak, of that relationality. This
interpreta-
tion takes on weight when we realize it is exactly the same reversal we
noted above in Socrates' introduction of 'intentionality' into the con-
30 Francisco
ception of eros. Gonzalez
Goodness interprets
is not the
goodLysis as presenting
because precisely the
it is relational samefor
(good
reversal in
me); instead, it is relational (good for me) because it is good . In other words,
relation to the notion of philia, namely, a movement from the traditional
we do not call it good because it is our own; instead, we wish to make
association
30
it our own
with because
the οίκείον,ittoisa good.
relation toDiotima is clear about
the good understood affirming
first intrinsically: the
'Socrates
 Plato and the Problem of Love 213

absolute character of goodness first, and then 'adding' (προ-θετέον) its

relationality. This does not mean, of course, that relativity is a feature
tacked on to goodness in a second moment, but only that the abso-
luteness has a logical priority within a context of relationality that is
always present. Let us look again at the last words of the above-quoted
passage: the absoluteness of the good does not in any way exclude its
being (also) relative to a particular person, or a particular respect; it is
just that this particularity does not by itself account for the goodness of
the good. I cherish something that belongs to me because it is good. Its
goodness does not exclude its belonging to me, but nor does it reduce to
that particular qualification. To the contrary, Diotima is here insisting
that the relativity must itself 're-duce,' in the sense of 'leading back,' to
what is simply good.
If we thus interpret the absoluteness of the good as having a
primacy,
which does not exclude but rather non-reductively includes relativity, it
provides a coherent way of reading an otherwise problematic feature of
Diotima's speech in the dialogue. On the one hand, as we have noted,
Diotima does indeed present goodness and beauty in the self-referen-
tial terms of eudaimonia. On the other hand, however, it is equally true
that the beauty toward which love ascends with ever-increasing pas-
sion, and presumably ever-increasing eudaimonia, is categorically non-
relative, i.e., beauty that is not beautiful in any particular respect, but
simply in itself. At the peak of love's ascent lies 'beauty in its nature'
(την φύσιν καλόν: 210e), which, though she had earlier claimed that
our
happiness is the ultimate reason for love (205a), she now identifies as
the ultimate goal of all of love's labors (od δη ενεκεν και od έμπροσθεν
πάντες πόνοι /σαν):
First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither
waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that
way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in
relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beauti-
ful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some
people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the
guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It
will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not
anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven,

on Loving One's Own: A Traditional Conception of ΦΙΛΙΑ Radically

Transformed',
Classical Philology 95 (2000): 379-98.
214 D.C. Schindler

or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in

form. (211a-b)

Kosman attempts to reconcile the relativity and absoluteness of to

καλόν by saying what Plato means by beauty itself here is 'our own
true but fugitive nature,'31 though he himself admits he does so because
he takes for granted that love, for Plato, is essentially self-love. But it
should be clear from our foregoing discussion that Plato explicitly and
emphatically rejects the notion that the self and what belongs to it (to
οίκεΐον) is as such the object of love. However much it may bring hap-
piness to the self — and we might say that it necessarily will bring hap-
piness precisely because it is good — the one and only object of love
for Plato is afito to καλόν.32 As we have been suggesting, to say that
the meaning of beauty cannot reduce to its relativity means that beauty
transcends the relative. If beauty is not beautiful because it is beautiful
in some particular respect, this implies that we cannot simply add up
all the ways that things are beautiful and identify that sum with beauty
itself. In the first place, the number of possible ways is infinite, and
therefore cannot be added. Moreover, even if it could, this would imply
that no new particular instance of beauty would be possible, which is
obviously absurd. Beauty thus necessarily transcends all of its possible
manifestations. When Plato describes it here as existing 'itself by itself
with itself . . . always one in form' (211b), he is referring precisely to
this
transcendence.
Now, we are all familiar with the claim that Plato's characteriza-
tion of beauty here is an example of his crude 'theory of forms', which
he proceeds to criticize himself in later dialogues, particularly in the
Parmenides.33 Although there is no space in the present context, an ar-
gument can be made, both on intrinsic philosophical grounds and on
textual grounds, that Plato never abandoned, or needed to abandon, a
commitment to the perfect transcendence of the forms.34 Here, we can
at least suggest that the desire to reject the transcendence of beauty
might stem from a misunderstanding of the meaning of absoluteness

31 Kosman, 60
32 Or, of course, auto to αγαθόν.
33 See Parmenides 130b ff.
34 See, e.g., Eric Perl, 'The Presence of the Paradigm: Immanence and Transcendence
in Plato's Theory of Forms', The Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999): 339-62.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 215

in Plato's thought, or more directly in his language, the meaning of 'it-

self-by-itself-with-itself-ness'. When we think of beauty as non-
relative,
we tend to assume that this implies the exclusion of relativity. In other
words, we take absoluteness and relativity to be mutually exclusive op-
posites. One can thus explain the dualism that we often attribute to
Plato, without considering the criticism he offers of this very dualism
in the Parmenides. But, while it is true that, if we, so to speak, absolu-
tize relativity as those do who characterize Platonic eros as essentially
self-referential, then we do in fact exclude absoluteness, the reverse is
not true: the absolute cannot define itself in opposition to, and therefore
relative to, the relative without contradiction. Instead, to be absolute is
precisely to be inclusive of all possible relations. In terms of the form
of beauty, its being absolute beauty is precisely what allows it to be the
beauty of many particulars, which is another way of saying it is what
allows there to be many — in principle, infinitely many — beautiful
things. Relativity may be in some sense opposed to absoluteness, but
absoluteness is not opposed to relativity.35
Such an interpretation of the transcendence of τό καλόν thus opens
up
a consistent reading of what Plato says about eros, and moreover offers
a striking way to resolve the perennial problem of the relation between
self and other in love. To see this, it is helpful to draw on a distinction
that Plato introduces in the Phaedo. After offering, as a sort of reductio
ad absurdum, an example of a simplistically materialist causal analysis
of a complex reality (namely, Socrates' being in prison), Socrates says:
'Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that with-
out which the cause would be able to act as a cause.'36 The physical
elements — i.e., the positions of his muscles and sinews, and so forth
— have to be such as they are in order for him to be in prison, but they
do not suffice to account for his being there. We would say that they
rep-
resent a necessary but not sufficient cause. The very same distinction
can be introduced in the present context. As Penner and Kosman have
argued, it is not possible for me to take something as good unless it is
in
some35 respect good
Kurt Sier 'for me'.
clarifies This is certainly
the distinction between true. But itasdoes
abstraction it is not mean
normally
understood
(which would imply simply a movement away from particularity toward the
uni-
versal), and the Platonic dialectic, which follows both horizontal extension and
vertical intension in a conceptual circle: see Die Rede der Diotima:
36 Phaedo, 99b
Untersuchungen
zum platonischen Symposion (Stuttgart: Teubner 1997), 155-8.
216 D.C. Schindler

that we are justified in inferring the relativity as the sufficient cause of

goodness. Indeed, as we have seen, there is good reason for denying
this, which Plato explicitly does. Instead, we may include the relativity
as a necessary cause — it is impossible for something to be good abso-
lutely without it ultimately also being good for me — and still insist
that the finally determinative cause is its being simply (απλώς) what it
is, namely, good. Indeed, once we recognize this distinction, we can go
even further, and state that a necessary consequence of its being simply
good is that it also be good for me, without thereby reducing love to
self-referentiality. To affirm that if it is not good for me in some respect,
it
cannot be said to be absolutely good (modus tollens), does not imply that
it is good because it is good for me. We can therefore agree with
Kosman
that aiming at το καλόν is, in some sense, aiming at one's 'true' self, if
we allow that one is most oneself when one possesses what is
ultimately
good for one; we may also agree that the good would not be good
unless
it bore some relation to us in our most original being; and we can still
insist that it is not good because it is most primordially our own. Rather,
to say it again, the good is most primordially our own, it most properly
belongs to us, because it is simply and absolutely good in itself.

IV The individual as object of eros

There is an additional criticism frequently raised against Platonic love,

which the foregoing reflections put us in a fruitful position to consid-
er, even if a final response will turn out to elude us. Gregory Vlastos
presents perhaps the best-known articulation of this complaint: Plato's
conception of eros, he says, leaves no place for a genuine love of the
individual person. Instead, because of the abstract and impersonal na-
ture of the exclusive object of love — the 'beautiful itself' —, the
move-
ment of eros can find no rest in any particular, but in fact can 'use'
individuals only as 'stepping stones' on the way to the soul's proper
end. Vlastos himself connects this criticism with what he takes to be
the
ego-centrism of Platonic eros. But, if it is indeed the case, as Kosman
in our view convincingly argues, that this second issue is independent
of the first, insofar as pure selflessness (an other-centeredness that ex-
cludes the other's relation to the self) likewise makes love of a particular
individual impossible, then our having shown the essentially self-tran-
scending nature of eros still leaves us to face this objection. If, indeed,
the only proper object of love for Plato is the beautiful/good itself, must
we conclude that all particular instances of beauty or goodness, be they
 Plato and the Problem of Love 217

physical things, persons, or ideas, can be ultimately nothing more than

'stepping stones'?37
In responding to this question, it is important to keep in mind that
this was not a question that Plato himself directly asked,38 and so what
we say will be somewhat speculative, drawing from our discussion of
the nature of eros above; it is, in other words, what Plato could have
said, given what we have interpreted as his understanding of eros. But
first a general observation is in order. While there is admittedly a plau-
sibility to the objection at first glance, given the necessarily
'impersonal'
nature of love's object in the dialogue, we must also acknowledge the
peculiar fact that what we would call the uniqueness of personality is
more tangibly present in Plato's writing than in that of any other thinker
before him, and has rarely been equaled in any philosopher after him.
The significance of the very person of Socrates, beyond the value of his
'ideas', is just one, though the most obvious example. It would be odd
to show such an exquisite attention — one might say a lover's interest
— in regard to something that one claims to be excluded in principle
from one's conception of love. But there are strong philosophical rea-
sons as well to think that the objection misses the mark.
Let us assume that I love a particular person. A host of questions
arise
if we think about this situation philosophically. Do I love the person
without any reference at all to her goodness? To say yes is to dissociate
love and goodness in principle, which would not only generate a host
of problems, but is clearly foreign to Plato. But if I love a person as
good
in some way, we must ask: as good simply in herself, or as good for
me?
Drawing on our previous discussion, we can see why either alternative
is
problematic. The utter selflessness of altruism paradoxically
undermines
the genuine goodness of the other, because it denies the other's goodness
for 37
me,Seea Irving
relative goodness
Singer, The Nature that would
of Love, necessarily
Vol. I: Plato to Luther, 2follow
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84-5. am hardly
to see affirming
his next-doorher
goodness in herself
neighbor becauseifhis
I insist that
eyes are it gives
set on me no
the universal joy orWhat
question, pleasure
is Man?at(The-
all to
aetetus, 174b), but he is not engaging this issue, here, as a problem of love and
its
proper object. When Plato does describe the erotic movement 'up' the so-called
ladder of love in the Symposium, he is talking about the love of bodies, and then
of
virtues and ideas, and not the love of persons.
218 D.C. Schindler

be with her. On the other hand, a reduction of your goodness to the joy
you afford me equally fails to appreciate your own intrinsic goodness.
Avoiding both reductions, we ought to say that eros is ordered to your
goodness simpliciter, which includes your goodness for me.
But here we run into the more pressing problem. Given our account
of goodness above, in what sense is it legitimate to speak of your good-
ness at all? Isn't goodness itself transcendent of all possible respects?
Isn't Plato saying in the Symposium that I ought to love goodness itself in
abstraction from all instances? Yes, in some sense he clearly is. But we
need to reflect on the alternative. To deny this would either require that
we dissociate love from goodness, which ultimately becomes nonsen-
sical, or that we identify the particular person with absolute goodness
itself. Even if it were possible thus to particularize the absoluteness of
goodness, doing so would entail what is obviously an extraordinarily
perverse order of love. To identify an individual person with absolute
goodness is to deny goodness to all other persons and things.
The absurdity of these alternatives should lead us to consider more
attentively the implication of affirming precisely a transcendent good-
ness as the proper object of eros. Following our earlier analysis, we
could interpret the transcendence and thus absoluteness of goodness in
an inclusive rather than exclusive manner. In this case, loving the good
in itself is not opposed to loving particular goods. Indeed, it cannot be.
Instead, we could say that loving goodness itself necessarily entails lov-
ing particular goods,39 40 but doing so in a new way: namely, not, in the
first place, merely as relative to me, but instead as relative to goodness
itself, which is another way of saying loving things simply for their own
sake.4 It is only because the object of love is transcendent that we do not
have to choose between the equally unsatisfying alternatives: either I
love you merely because you are good for me, or I love you, not
because
you are good for me, but because you are merely good in yourself. To

39 See Republic V, 474c-5b.

40 John Brentlinger also criticizes the interpretation, according to which Plato
instru-
mentalizes persons for a love of the properties they possess (ultimately for the
abstract property of goodness). He suggests instead that the property loved
ought
to be taken as the reason that explains why we love the person or thing, the basis
but not the sole object of the love: see 'The Nature of Love', in Alan Soble, ed.,
Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love (New York: Paragon
House
1989), 136-48, at 141-2. Our interpretation offers a metaphysical justification,
one
could say, for the point Brentlinger makes.
 Plato and the Problem of Love 219

love goodness in a not-merely-relative way is to love all good things in

a
not-merely-relative way. In other words, moving up the 'ladder of love'
is not a horizontal sequence, which would imply exchanging one object
for the next; rather, it represents an increasingly disinterested love of
beauty wherever it is found. But, in contrast to at least one interpreta-
tion of the Kantian understanding of disinterestedness, for Plato, the
more perfectly disinterestedly one loves beauty, the more wholly and
passionately involved in it one becomes, and the more fulfilled. While
the Platonic view may still not represent the Romantic ideal of an
exclu-
sive love of a particular person, nor the Christian notion of human eros
as a sacramental expression of the relationship between Christ and the
Church, and through it, the relationship between God and the world,
one may nevertheless say the notion does not in itself exclude a devel-
opment in these directions.
There is one more way in which the objection we have been dis-
cussing misinterprets Plato's notion of eros and its object. The objection
reads eros as pushing impatiently past imperfect reflections of beauty
in order that it may seize on an immediate vision of absolute beauty.
This interpretation assumes that the vision of το καλόν has an essential-
ly 'private' character, which would of course entail my turning away
from others so that the vision can be had for itself. Once again, this
assumption is based on the dualistic notion of transcendence we have
been criticizing. As we have seen, Plato is unequivocally clear that the
drive to 'make the beautiful one's own' is not, and cannot be, a taking
of beauty individually into oneself, but can only be a taking oneself to
beauty, which will always necessarily transcend oneself and everything
else in its absoluteness. In this sense, beauty cannot but be shared. This
is the meaning of the one-ness of the forms: it is what opens beauty to
the
endless multiplicity of expressions. We see here a philosophical
founda-
tion for the remarkable 'availability' Socrates displays in his intercourse
with others, his desire always to see things with others. We also see why
there is in principle no contradiction between the soul's pursuit of
beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus' depiction of the manic event
of eros between souls, who ascend jointly to the beautiful.41 Once
again,
the ordering of eros to absolute beauty does not in principle exclude
generous and desire-laden companionship. Instead, we ought to say
41 Phaedrus, 256d-e
that it intensifies it.
220 D.C. Schindler

This last observation raises a final point. When we interpret the

abso-
luteness of το καλόν in an inclusive manner, things that we tend to op-
pose to one another become paradoxically intertwined. We have seen
an example in the often-assumed opposition between self-fulfillment
and generosity in love. But we may see the same paradox in the pas-
sionate nature of eros. If it is the case that the absoluteness of beauty
necessarily includes relativity, then it follows that, in an eros properly
ordered, a sober freedom will increase in tandem with intense attach-
ment. Moreover, as we see in Socrates, an 'exclusive' concern for
beauty
itself heightens the interest in even physical beauty.42 As Holderlin's
epigram on Socrates and Alcibiades has it: 'Wer das Tiefste gedacht,
liebt das Lebendigste.' There is, in short, no reason in principle to at-
tribute to Plato the contempt for the sensible world that has been so
widely disseminated under the name of Platonism; nor are there any
grounds for opposing Platonic eros, as abstract and self-centered, to the
unconditionality of agape. Platonic eros is likewise unconditional, but
that is also precisely why it includes without restriction a desire for the
beauty reflected in the physical world.
To return to the original issue, Platonic love cannot be said to be
auto-erotic, but should be called 'agatho-erotic' or 'kalo-erotic,' for its
object is not το οίκεΐον as such, but simply the good and beautiful. The
absoluteness of the final object of love, then, integrates all the relative
objects within their proper order. What Socrates introduces into the
conversation at Agathon's house — and, indeed, what he introduces as
something he learned from Diotima, and thus as coming from beyond
this apparently closed circle of men who have assumed that eros is de-
sire for the same — is love's essential origin in what is genuinely other
than the self. But because this other, which Plato shows in the Republic
to be the perfectly transcendent and thus absolute other, does not ex-
clude, but non-reductively embraces relativity, the ecstasy of eros, and
all the dispossession of self this implies, turns out, one could say, to be
'perfectly natural'.
Department of Humanities
304 Saint Augustine Center
Villanova, PA 19085
U.S.A.
david.schindler@villanova.edu
42 Socrates, we might recall, nearly swoons with desire when he catches a glimpse
inside Charmides' cloak: Charmides, 155d.