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....

Writing About Love

At the end of the Symposium, Alcibiades has gone off, presumably with the throng of Bacchic revelers, who burst into his life as representatives of his overpowering love for the approval and flattery of the crowd. Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon are left behind discussing tragedy and comedy: “the main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that the same man knows (epistasthai) how to write both comedy and tragedy, that someone who is by craft (technê) a tragic poet is a comic poet too”.

The key words here, as we learn in the Ion, are epistasthai and technê. Ordinary poets cannot write both comedy and tragedy, because they do not write out of knowledge and craft (technê) but out of divine inspiration. If they did write out of craft and knowledge, if they were craftsmen poets, they would be able to write both comedy and tragedy, because opposites are always studied by the same craft. Thus the comedic craft and the tragic craft would have to be one and the same; just as one and the same craft, medicine, deals with both sickness and health.

Socrates tells us what a craftsman poet would be able to write, he does not tell us what he would write. Other Platonic spokesmen are somewhat more forthcoming. “We ourselves are poets,” the Athenian Stranger tells us in the Laws, “who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the finest and the best; at any rate, our entire constitution is constructed as an imitation of the finest and best way of life — the very thing which we claim is the truest tragedy”. Earlier in the same discussion, the Stranger is equally explicit that this same constitution, though not a comedy, does nonetheless embody comedic knowledge:

“Someone who is going to gain practical wisdom can't learn serious matters without learning ridiculous ones, or anything else, for that matter, without its opposite. But if we intend to acquire virtue, even on a small scale, we can't be serious and comic too, and this is precisely why we must learn to recognize what is ridiculous, to avoid being trapped by our ignorance of it into doing or saying something ridiculous, when we don't have to”.

Finally, Alcibiades arrives with significantly enough a flute-girl. And though she does not play, her arrival inaugurates the further decline of the symposium into something even more like the kind of symposium reviled in the Protagoras as “a symposium of common, vulgar fellows… who, unable to entertain one another with their own conversation, put up the price of flute-girls, and pay large sums to hear the sound of the flute instead of their own talk”. This is the element of satyr-play in the Symposium satyr imagery is frequent in Alcibiades' speech.

The idea is the one mentioned earlier. Some love stories the good ones are tragedies (in the special sense of the term introduced in the Laws), they involve the kind of love found in the best kind of life, a life that comes as close as possible to the divine one in which we achieve happiness by having good things be ours forever. Other love stories are comedies: they involve a lesser kind of love. Others still are satyr plays: genital farces. But the true story of love, the story that is Plato's Symposium itself, is the story of all these stories. In the Symposium, it takes the form appropriate to its genre and audience. But in the Phaedrus, we learn of the longer more technical road it might take in the future, when armed with a scientific psychology and rhetoric it becomes a matter for experts.