Love and the Ascent to the Beautiful (Part-1)

Socrates is adept at some parts of the art of love but cannot take his beloveds all the way. So he is clearly in need of further instruction in the art of love. In the Symposium, this is provided to him by Diotima, whom he describes as “the one who taught me the art of love”. And what she teaches him, in a nutshell, is Platonism. What the elenchus needs if it is to satisfy rather than frustrate love, in other words, is the theory of Platonic Forms. What Socrates needs and so ought to love is Plato! The story of Platonic love is, one might say, the story of the Platonizing of Socrates.

If what Socrates learned from Diotima was about all love, however, it would be refuted by the very fact of Alcibiades, whose love for Socrates has not led him to love the beautiful itself. It would be equally refuted, indeed, by all the other symposiasts, none of whom has been led there by his love. But Diotima's love story is not so general. It is self advertised as a story about “loving boys correctly (to orthôs paiderastein)” as a lesson in “the correct way to go or to be led by another to the art of love”. To be sure, it doesn't itself explicitly provide us with a story about how Erôs can act as a force which retards development. But that isn't because Plato thought Erôs could not act as such a force consider Alcibiades. Rather, it is because Diotima's story is a story about successful or correct love.

If the lover's accounts are to achieve this goal, however, they mustn't be the product of distorting fantasy, as Nietzsche thinks so many of our moral concepts are and as some feminists think our concept of romantic love itself is. What is intended to insure that they will not is their openness to reality an openness guaranteed by the fact that in the course of his ascent the lover must study the beauty of ways of life and laws and the beauty of the sciences. What he gains from these studies are the conceptual resources needed to see the world, including the human world, aright to gain knowledge of it. This is not the project an analysand takes up in psycho analysis. Nor is it the one that we less formally undertake when we reflect on our own love stories in hopes of understanding them (often a project provoked alas by an unhappy ending). It is instead the project of philosophy, as Plato conceives of it. That is why it culminates in “the birth of many gloriously beautiful accounts and theories in unstinting love of wisdom (philosophia)”. Yet the grander project intersects with the analysand's project and with ours in an interesting way. The terms or concepts we use to tell our love stories must themselves be coherent if the stories we use them to tell are themselves to be coherently livable.

To be continues....