Socrates and the Art of Love

“The only thing I say I know,” Socrates tells us in the Symposium “is the art of love”. Taken literally, it is an incredible claim. Are we really to believe that the man who affirms when on trial for his life that he knows himself to be wise “in neither a great nor a small way”,knows the art of love? In fact, the claim is a nontrivial play on words facilitated by the fact that the noun eros (love) and the verb erotan (to ask questions) sound as if they are etymologically connected, a connection explicitly exploited in the Cratylus. Socrates knows about the art of love in that, but just insofar as he knows how to ask questions, how to converse elenctically.

At the end of the examination, Socrates characterizes what he has accomplished: “This is how you should talk to your boyfriends, Hippothales, making them humble and drawing in their sails, instead of swelling them up and spoiling them, as you do”. It sounds simply chastening put like that. But in the overall context of the Lysis, where love is a desire and desire is an emptiness, it is much more. It is a step in the creation of the canonical lover.

Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom (philosophein), whether they are gods or men. Neither do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid person loves wisdom. There remains only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don't know.

So by showing Lysis that he isn't already wise, by getting him to recognize that he doesn't know, Socrates sets him on the road to philosophy.

The connection, amounting to an identification between the art of discussion and the art of loving boys explored in the Lysis allows us to see why Plato's own explorations of love invariably involve an exploration of discussion too love talk in the Lysis, symposiastic speech-making and drama in the Symposium, oratory and rhetoric in the Phaedrus. Loving boys correctly, after all, is in part at least just a matter of knowing how to talk to them, of how to persuade them to love you back.

Inspired From www.wikipedia.com