Love is one of the themes that Plato repeatedly philosophizes, problematizes, discusses, and talks about.
In the Republic, Plato says that love is a “tyrant” that constantly brings us face to face with and very close to what is base and immoral in our soul. But love is also a characteristic of the philosopher. Love is what renders philosophy possible in the first place, for the philosopher’s love for knowledge and for knowing what is eternal and unchanging is the origin of philosophizing and wisdom.
The ambiguity of love in the Republic lies thus in that it delivers us into a realm where lawlessness holds sway and brings us close to the real, the unchanging, the eternal, and their truth.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates defines love as a “desire for beautiful things”. Love is a desire that is turned toward the “beauty of bodies”. This definition makes love nothing but a desire, a desire for pleasures, for bodily pleasures. Socrates says that this constant turning toward pleasures distances us from reason and rationality.
This definition of love resembles the Republic’s view that love is a “tyrant”, which endeavors to constantly dominate and control, and a domain in which lawlessness dwells. In this definition, love is placed over against reason, order, and what belongs to them.
Yet to love belongs another aspect, different from this disordered form of love, which lacks reason. Socrates says that there exists a form of love whose object is not physical. This form of love is related to the soul. In this form of love, the beautiful toward which love is directed is transcendent.
Socrates says that this form of love takes the soul away from its earthly and worldly state, toward and into another realm, which is “beyond the heavens”. Socrates says that this realm is a “really real reality”. This form of love is not a mere desire, but rather what transfers the soul to its transcendent destination, to which it originally belongs.
In the Symposium, love and its nature are thoroughly and extensively discussed. The Symposium contains six speeches thinking, philosophizing, discussing, and talking about love. A seventh speech by Alcibiades on Socrates, who is the personification of love itself, follows and concludes these six speeches.
Aristophanes’s speech is the most famous speech; it thinks toward and speaks about the origin of love; it says that love first became possible when Zeus divided spherical beings into two fragments. This dividing into two renders it necessary that each part searches for its other half so that a lost unity could be recovered. This dividing into two obliges each detached fragment to search for its other half so that their original unity could be achieved again.
Socrates’s speech, which tells the details of a conversation he had with the prophetess Diotima, is the most thorough and rigorous speech because it responds to, orders, discusses, and questions the other speeches.
For Diotima, love links together the divine with the human in such a way that renders them related and connected. For Diotima, that toward which love is turned is beauty; beauty and the beautiful are the objects of love. Diotima says that beauty is goodness. This means that love is a desire for goodness and the good.
Unlike Aristophanes, who sees love as a desire for completion or a search for lost unity, Diotima sees love as a desire for goodness and the good in itself. This desire for goodness reaches its completion and its most perfect form when it becomes a desire for eternal goodness.
Love becomes a desire not only for goodness, but for eternal goodness when its purpose becomes “begetting in the beautiful, both in body and in soul”, since the mortal glimpses, and carries out a turning toward, the immortal through reproduction.
Diotima then says that the purest and most perfect form of love could be achieved by following a specific path: It begins by loving beautiful bodies, which leads to loving all bodies to the extent that they are beautiful. Love then becomes distanced from the body and turned toward the soul. Love then undergoes another transformation in which it becomes turned toward knowledge and knowing. This means that love passes through three levels of beauty: physical, moral, and intellectual.
Beauty is then encountered in itself, in its perfect, absolute, and complete existence, which is neither related to nor linked together with anything. From out of this absolute beauty emerge all the other levels of beauty. This beauty precedes and exceeds every beautiful thing and all beauty. This level of beauty is forever distanced from everything else; its place is elsewhere, forever distanced from reason and the senses; an unreachable beauty that never becomes less or changes.
For more articles on Plato’s philosophy, visit this webpage.