## 1. Socrates and the Art of Love



"The only thing I say I know," Socrates tells us in the
*Symposium*, "is the art of love" (*ta*
*erotika*) (177d8-9). 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" (*Apology* 21b4-5)
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* (398c5-e5). Socrates knows about the art of love in
that--but just insofar as--he knows how to ask questions,
how to converse elenctically.



Just how far that is, we discover in the *Lysis*, where
Socrates makes a similar claim. Hippothales, like Socrates, loves
beautiful boys and philosophical discussions (203b6-204a3). But
he does not know the art of love and so does not know how to talk to
Lysis--the boy with whom he is in love. What Hippothales does is
sing eulogies to Lysis, and *that*, Socrates argues, no skilled
lover would ever do. For if your suit succeeds "everything
you've said and sung turns out to eulogize yourself as victor in
having won such a boyfriend," but if it fails, then "the
greater your praise of his beauty and goodness, the more you will seem
to have lost and the more you will be ridiculed." Consequently,
someone "who is wise in the art of love (*ta
erotika*) doesn't praise his beloved until he has him:
he fears how the future may turn out" (205e2-206a2).
Convinced, Hippothales asks Socrates to tell him "what someone
should say or do to get his prospective boyfriend to love him?"
(206c1-3). As in the *Symposium*, Socrates is
uncharacteristically forthcoming: "if you're willing to
have him talk with me, I might be able to give you a demonstration of
how to carry on a discussion with him" (c4-6). What
follows is an elenctic examination of Lysis. Socrates' lessons
in love, we may infer, are elenctic lessons--lessons in how to
ask and answer questions.



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" (210e2-5).
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--the philosopher:



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.
(218a2-b1)



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 (cf. *Sophist* 231b3-8).



The elenchus is important to love, then, because it creates a hunger
for wisdom--a hunger which it cannot itself assuage. So even
though Lysis is already something of a philosopher when he meets
Socrates and receives a rare accolade from him--"I was
pleased with his love of wisdom (*philosophia*)"
(213d6)--he, too, is left in puzzlement (*aporia*). He is
made aware of his desire by Socrates but the desire itself remains
unsatisfied. Socrates may be the master of foreplay, of arousing
desire, and may to that extent be a master of the art of love, but
when it comes to satisfying desire, he is a failure.



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.


## 2. Socrates and Athenian Paiderastia



As a man who loves boys in an idiosyncratic, because elenctic, way,
Socrates is placed in potential conflict with the norms of a peculiar
Athenian social institution, that of *paiderastia*--the
socially regulated intercourse between an older Athenian male
(*erastes*) and a teenage boy (*eromenos*,
*pais*), through which the latter was supposed to learn virtue.
And this potential, as we know, was realized with tragic
consequences--in 399 BC Socrates was found guilty of corrupting
the young men of Athens and condemned to death. The effect on Plato is
palpable in his works, turning very many of them into
defenses--not always uncritical--of Socrates, and of what he
represented for the young men he encountered. His account in the
*Symposium* of one such relationship--that with the
brilliant and beautiful Alcibiades--is an illuminating case in
point.



Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates--"it was
obvious," the *Symposium* (222c1-2) tells
us--that when asked to speak of love, he speaks of his beloved.
No general theories of love for him, just the vividly remembered story
of the times he spent with a man so extraordinary there has never been
anyone like him--a man so powerfully erotic he turned the
conventional world of love upside down by "seeming to be a lover
(*erastes*) while really establishing himself as a
beloved boy (*pais*) instead" (222b3-4).



The stories of all the other symposiasts, too, are stories of their
particular loves masquerading as stories of love itself, stories about
what *they find* beautiful masquerading as stories about what
*is* beautiful. For Phaedrus and Pausanius, the canonical image
of true love--the quintessential love story--features the
right sort of older male lover and the right sort of beloved boy. For
Eryximachus the image of true love is painted in the languages of his
own beloved medicine and of all the other crafts and sciences. For
Aristophanes it is painted in the language of comedy. For Agathon, in
the loftier tones of tragedy. In ways that these men are unaware of,
then, but that Plato knows, their love stories are themselves
manifestations of their loves and of the inversions or perversions
expressed in them. They think their stories are the truth about love,
but they are really love's delusions--"images,"
as Diotima will later call them. As such, however, they are essential
parts of that truth. For the power of love to engender delusive images
of the beautiful is as much a part of the truth about it as its power
to lead to the beautiful itself. Later, we shall learn why.



Love stories, however inadequate as theories of love, are nonetheless
stories, *logoi*, items that admit of analysis. But because
they are manifestations of our loves, not mere cool bits of
theorizing, we--our deepest feelings--are invested in them.
They are therefore tailor-made, in one way at least, to satisfy the
Socratic sincerity condition, the demand that you say what you believe
(*Crito* 49c11-d2, *Protagoras* 331c4-d1). Under the
cool gaze of the elenctic eye, they are tested for consistency with
other beliefs that lie just outside love's controlling and often
distorting ambit. Under such testing, a lover may be forced to say
with Agathon, "I didn't know what I was talking about in
that story" (201b11-12). The love that expressed itself in
his love story meets then another love: his rational desire for
consistency and intelligibility; his desire to be able to tell and
live a coherent story; his desire--to put it the other way
around--not to be endlessly frustrated and conflicted, because he
is repetitively trying to live out an incoherent love story.



In Alcibiades' love story, in particular, these two desires are
self-consciously in play: "Socrates is the only man in the world
who has made me feel shame... I know perfectly well that I
can't prove he's wrong when he tells me what I should do:
yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in
to my desire to please the crowd" (216b1-5). Even such
awareness of conflict as is manifested here, however, is no guarantee
of a satisfactory resolution. For the new love--the one that
seems to offer coherence, satisfaction, and release from
shame--may turn out to be just the old frustrating one in
disguise.



Alcibiades' famous failed attempt to seduce Socrates shows that
this is so in his case too (218b8-e5). For Alcibiades doesn't
try to win Socrates' love by undertaking the difficult task of
self-transformation required to become a more virtuous, and so more
truly beautiful and lovable, person. Instead, he takes the easy,
familiar path of offering the physical attractions he already
has--the ones that have earned him the approval of the crowd.
When these fail him, it is to the crowd (in the form of the Bacchic
revelers we meet at the end of the *Symposium*) he will
regressively return, having never really succeeded in turning
away.



That he has never turned away is made yet more vivid in one of the
most intriguing passages in the *Symposium*. Socrates,
Alcibiades says, is "ironical *eironeuomenos*) and
spends his whole life playing with people. Yet, I don't know
whether anyone else has seen the figures within (*ta entos
agalmata*) when he is serious and opened up, but I saw them once,
and I thought that they were so divine and golden, so marvelously
beautiful, that I just had to do whatever Socrates told me"
(216e4-217a2). Imagine seeing Socrates without his ironic mask
of mock modesty. What we wouldn't give to see that. As is so
often the case with love, however, it is fantasy we are dealing with.
What Alcibiades thinks he sees in Socrates are embryonic virtues,
which--like spermatazoa in the embryology the *Symposium*
implicitly embraces when it speaks of *the lover* as pregnant
and as seeking a beautiful boy in which to beget an
offspring--need only be ejaculated into the right receptacle in
order to grow into their mature forms (209a5-c2). Sex can lead to
virtue, in other words, without the need for hard work. As soon as the
illusion is enjoyed, therefore, it gives birth not to a realistic
attempt to acquire virtue, but to the sexual seduction fantasy
mentioned earlier.



The origins of this fantasy--though, no doubt, partly
personal--are predominantly social. It is the complex ideology of
Athenian *paiderasteia* that has shaped Alcibiades' own
desires. For, according to it, love is really "two
things": good Uranian love, whose object is the soul, and whose
aim is to instill virtue in the younger male; and bad Pandemotic love,
whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the
older lover (180c1-d7). What causes the split is the need Pandemotic
love has to mask itself as Uranian love in order to preserve the
illusion that the young man's participation in it is compatible
with his status as a future male citizen. It cannot, then, be
motivated by a reprehensible desire to adopt a passive, slavish,
female pleasure-seeking role. Instead, another motive must be invented
for it--a willingness to accept "slavery for the sake of
virtue" (184c2-3).



A major cost of preserving this split, however, is that the older
male's body-focused, sexual intercourse must itself be masked as
intercourse of a more respectable sort. Alcibiades' later
re-description of Socrates' inner figures shows him succumbing
to the double-vision that inevitably results:



If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they'd strike
you as totally ridiculous; they're clothed in words as coarse as
the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He's always going on
about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners... But
if the arguments are opened and one sees them from the inside, he will
find first that they are the only arguments with any sense in them,
and next that they contain within themselves utterly divine and
multitudinous figures of virtue (*agalmat'
aretes*). (221e1-222a4)



For Alcibiades, then, Socrates' body is identical to his words;
the virtues that are in him are in them; talking philosophy is having
sexual intercourse, and vice versa.


## 3. Loving Socrates



At the beginning of the *Symposium*, an unidentified man wants
to hear what was said about love by Socrates and the others at
Agathon's house. He has heard a garbled account. Now he wants
Apollodorus to tell him what was really said. But Apollodorus
wasn't there either. He got his account of the proceedings
second-hand from Aristodemus. All these men who ought to be chasing
boys are presented as so besotted with Socrates and his conversations
that one of them--Apollodorus--makes it his business to know
exactly what Socrates does and says each day (172c4-6), while
another--Aristodemus--is so far gone in his passion for
Socrates that he walks barefoot like his beloved (173b1-4). One
reason for this complex set-up is to let us see the inverting impact
of Socrates--and so of philosophy--on Athenian paiderastic
norms. Another is more subtle. Alcibiades' love for Socrates
focuses on the beautiful figures of virtue which he thinks he sees
lying beneath those "words as coarse as the hides worn by the
most vulgar satyrs," which are the analog for him of
Socrates' ugly, satyr-like body (215b3-4). Aristodemus'
love for Socrates, by contrast, seems to focus on his coarse exterior,
so that Aristodemus himself is a sort of inverted Alcibiades, whose
very name associates him with Pausanias' body-centered goddess
of love, *Pandemos*. Loving Socrates, we may infer, is a
complex business, since just what someone loves in loving him is tied
to that person's peculiar desires, and the limits they impose on
how like Socrates he can become.



In the dialogue's next few scenes, this point is driven home.
When Aristodemus meets him, Socrates has just bathed and put on his
fancy sandals--"both very unusual events"
(174a3-4). Aristodemus remarks on this because he is naturally
sensitive to those aspects of Socrates which he himself--perhaps
because of his own size and appearance (173b2)--has chosen to
emulate. The reason for the departure from his usual habits, Socrates
explains, is that he is going to Agathon's party and wants
"beauty to go to beauty" (174a9). Oddly, this
doesn't stop him from bringing Aristodemus--un-bathed,
un-sandaled, un-beautiful--along. But what is odd from the point
of view of *Socrates'* self-ascribed motivations is not
at all odd from that of *Plato's*. He has now made the
complexity of Socrates--his beautiful insides and ugly outsides
or vice versa--as dramatically present to our eyes as to those of
Agathon and his other guests.



Socrates is invited to Agathon's--Goodman's.
('Agathon' means good in Greek.) He thinks--wrongly
as it happens--that Aristodemus isn't invited, but offers
to take him along anyway. Aristodemus'
reply--"I'll do whatever you say"
(174b2)--again connects him to Alcibiades: "I just had to
do whatever he told me" (217a1-2). "Come with me
then," Socrates responds, "and we shall prove the proverb
wrong; the truth is, 'Good men go uninvited to Goodman's
feast'"
 (174b4-5).[1]
 Aristodemus is not convinced. "Socrates, I'm
afraid... mine is the case of an inferior arriving uninvited at
the table of a wise man" (174c5-7). The familiar Socratic
tri-unity--good, beautiful, wise--are all now in play.



Despite his reservations, Aristodemus agrees to accompany
Socrates--but with an important proviso: "See what defense
you're going to make (*apologese*) for
bringing me along, because I won't admit I came uninvited,
I'll say you brought me!" (174c7-d1). It is this proviso
that initiates the next mystifying episode. It begins when Socrates
replies by under-quoting Homer: "We'll take counsel about
what to say 'when two go together along the way'"
(174d2-3). What he leaves out is what happens when two
*do* go together, namely, "one of them knows before the
other" (*Iliad* X. 24). The elision of this phrase is
matched by an elision of Plato's own. For what happened on the
road to Agathon's is that "Socrates began to think about
something, lost himself in thought, and kept lagging behind"
(174d4-7). Yet we are never told what he thought
about--what it was that one knew before the other.



That the match between these two elisions is significant is
established by another match: the one between the defense Socrates
doesn't give for bringing Aristodemus to Agathon's and the
one he doesn't give before the jury in 399 B.C., when he is on
trial for corrupting the youth. I mean, the defense Socrates'
familiar spirit or *daimonion* prevents him from giving by not
preventing him from giving the one in which he speaks and acts in his
own accustomed elenctic way--in which he plays the part of
himself (*Ap*. 40a2-b6). Later in the *Symposium*, the
match is reestablished by the close parallels between the preamble to
Socrates' speech in praise of *Eros* and that to
his speech before the jury. There he is "amazed
(*ethaumasa*)" by what his accusers say (*Ap*.
17a4-5); here Agathon's speech is "amazing
(*thaumasta*)" (*Smp*. 198b4). There he
isn't a clever (*deinos*) speaker, unless cleverness
consists in speaking the truth (*Ap*. 17a4-b6). Here he
isn't clever in the art of love unless encomia to
*Eros* involve telling the truth about it (*Smp*.
198c5-199a6). There "what the jurors will hear will be
spoken extemporaneously (*epituchousin*) in whatever words come
to mind" (*Ap*. 17c1-2); here the symposiasts will
"hear the truth spoken about *Eros* in such words
and arrangements as occur to me extemporaneously (*tuche
epelthousa*)" (*Smp*. 199b3-5). Whatever
occupies Socrates on the road to Agathon's, we may infer, ends
not in the knowledge Homer is so confident either he or Aristodemus
will have, but in the aporetic awareness of the absence of knowledge
that distinguishes Socrates' "human wisdom" from the
"more than human wisdom" claimed by the sophists
(*Ap*. 20c4-e8).



The result of Socrates' losing his way in thought and ending up
stymied in Agathon's neighbor's porch is that Aristodemus,
like a proper Socratic paraclete, arrives at Agathon's quite a
bit before Socrates. When Socrates finally does arrive in *propria
person*, Agathon says: "Socrates, come lie down next to me.
Who knows, if I touch you, I may catch a bit of the wisdom that came
to you under my neighbor's porch" (175c7-d1). Socrates
replies with an obviously sexual simile, which acknowledges, so as
later once again to invert, paiderastic norms: "If only wisdom
were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one
when we connect them with a piece of yarn. If wisdom were that way
too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will
be filled from you with wisdom of great beauty" (175d4-e2). What
actually happens, however, is the very reverse. Socrates responds to
Agathon's fancy speech about love with an elenchus, so that his
emptiness, his lack of knowledge, flows into Agathon, destroying the
wisdom of great beauty that had won his tragedy a first prize the day
before (175e4-7).


## 4. Love and the Ascent to the Beautiful



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" (201d5). 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 orthos paiderastein*)"
(211b5-6)--as a lesson in "the correct way to go or
to be led by another to the art of love" (211b7-c1). To be sure,
it doesn't itself explicitly provide us with a story about how
*Eros* can act as a force which retards development. But
that isn't because Plato thought *Eros* could not
act as such a force--consider Alcibiades. Rather, it is because
Diotima's story is a story about successful or correct love.



The credibility of Diotima's love story is another matter, of
course. To many, it has seemed both incredible and distasteful,
because it seems to say that beautiful individuals have only
instrumental value. When one has climbed the ladder, of which they are
merely the first rung, one should kick it--and them--away.
But is this message really Diotima's?



What we all love, according to Diotima, is the good--that is to
say, we want good things to be ours forever. But because we are
mortal, the closest we can come to satisfying this desire is to
initiate an endless cycle of reproduction in which each new generation
has good things. We achieve this, in a famous phrase, by "giving
birth in beauty (*tokos en kalo*)" (206b7-8,
e5). What does this mean? Like Athenian *paiderasteia*, Diotima
recognizes two fundamentally different kinds of love, two
fundamentally different varieties of the desire to give birth in
beauty. In the case of heterosexual lovers, who are "pregnant in
body," such giving birth consists in producing children who
resemble, and so share in the beauty of their parents (209a3-4).
Homosexual lovers, however, are a different story. What they give
birth to is "wisdom and the rest of virtue" (209b8). When
a man who is pregnant in soul finds a beautiful boy, Diotima says, it
"makes him instantly teem with accounts of virtue"
(209b8), or "beautiful accounts" (210a8). Giving birth to
virtue and giving birth to accounts of it are obviously different. But
some of the other phrases Diotima uses show us how to mitigate the
difference. For what homosexual lovers want is to give birth to
accounts of virtue of a particular sort--ones that can be used in
"the proper ordering of cities and households"
(209a6-7), and so can "make young men better"
(210c1-3).



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 (210c3-5) and the
beauty of the sciences (c6-7). 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 psychoanalysis. 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*)" (210d5-6). 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.



In Plato's view, this means that they must be the concepts the
true lover uses once he has seen the beautiful itself--the
concepts whose ontological correlates are forms. If they are not, they
will be incoherent and the lover who employs them will find himself
embroiled in a love story he does not understand, a love story whose
incoherence the elenchus, or psychoanalysis, or just plain critical
scrutiny will reveal. It is this incoherence, indeed, encountered at
lower stages in the ascent, that leads the correct lover, under
pressure from his rational desire for truth and consistency, and the
pain of inconsistency, to climb to the next stage.



We can see Diotima, then, not only as revealing the other more
abstract loves that a true lover of boys must have, but also as
exploring the conditions concepts must meet if they are to figure in
genuinely coherent love stories. Her story isn't about a lover
who abandons the individual boys he loves, but about someone who comes
to love boys successfully by coming to love something else as
well.



Like Diotima herself, we have been concentrating on what other things
a lover is led to love by his love for his beloved boy. We have said
nothing about the changes explorations in this enlarged erotic field
effect in the desires and feelings of the lover himself. But these,
too, help us to see what happens to his love for his boy in the course
of his explorations. What hooks the lover to begin with is love for a
particular body: "First, if the Leader leads aright, he should
love one body and beget beautiful accounts there"
(210a6-8). At this stage, what the boy engages in the lover is
his sexual desire for physical beauty, albeit one which, in firm
keeping with the norms of Athenian *paiderastia*, is supposedly
aim-inhibited: instead of sexual intercourse, it leads to discussions
about beauty and to accounts of it. Here the beauty at issue is, in
the first instance, the boy *who represents beauty itself to the
lover.* That is why, when the lover finally comes to see the
beautiful itself, "beauty will no longer seem to you to be
measured by gold or raiment or beautiful boys or youths, which now you
look upon dumbstruck" (211d3-5). One effect of generating
*accounts* of this beauty, however, is that the lover comes to
see his beloved's beautiful body as one among many: if it is
beautiful, so are any other bodies the accounts fit. And this
initially cognitive discovery leads to a conative change:
"Realizing this he is established as a lover of all beautiful
bodies and relaxes this excessive preoccupation with one, thinking
less of it and believing it to be a small matter"
(210b4-6).



It is important in reading Diotima's description of this change
that we see it as comparative and contrastive: the lover used to
*overvalue* his beloved (211d5-8, quoted below)--now
he *values him appropriately*. But valuing appropriately is
still valuing. The boy is still included in the class of beautiful
bodies the lover now loves. It is also important to notice that
cognitive and conative change are going hand-in-hand. To recognize
that his beloved is one among many, the lover's love for him has
to change. And that means that psychological resources within the
lover--beyond his sexual responsiveness to physical
beauty--are coming into play. More of the lover is now involved
in his love. Hence what his beloved might be thought to lose in
exclusivity he gains in richness--and no doubt in endurance and
reliability--of response. When his physical bloom fades, he will
now still be loved.



But love that is to escape frustration cannot stop with bodies. The
attempt to formulate an account of love free from puzzles and immune
to elenctic refutation must lead on from beautiful bodies to beautiful
souls, and so to the beautiful laws and practices that will improve
souls and make young men better. Again this cognitive achievement is
matched by a conative one. When the lover sees that all these
beautiful things are somehow akin in the beauty, he comes to think
that "bodily beauty is a small thing" (210c5-6), and
so, as before, becomes less obsessed with it.



At the top of the *scala amoris* lies the beautiful itself, the
first loved object that--like the "primary object of love"
(*proton philon*) in the *Lysis*
(219d2-e4)--is not in any way gone beyond. Here, it seems, the
lover at last finds something worthy of the obsessive attention he had
once lavished on his beloved boy (211d8-212a7). Nonetheless,
obsession is out of place even here. For the beautiful itself can no
more satisfy the lover's desires to eat and drink than his
beloved can. Here--as there--what he would do if it were
possible must not be confused with what he can and does do. After all,
the lover himself cannot become immortal except by giving birth in the
beauty he has at last found. He does that, however, precisely by
arranging for his beloved to grow up, become truly virtuous, and be
with him in the contemplation of--and, to the extent that it is
possible, the possession of--true beauty.


## 5. The Art and Psychology of Love Explained



In the *Phaedrus* we find a more detailed account of the
psychology and art of love than in the *Symposium*. This
account will be our exclusive focus. The soul, whether divine or
human, Socrates claims, is like "the natural union of a team of
winged horses and their charioteer" (246a6-7). But whereas
in a divine soul all three elements are "good and come from good
stock," in a human soul the white horse (familiar from
*Republic* IV as the honor-loving spirited element) is
"beautiful and good, and of similar stock," while the
black one (the *Republic*'s appetitive element) is
"the opposite and of the opposite stock," so that
"the driving in our case is necessarily difficult and
troublesome" (a7-b4). When spirit together with the charioteer
(the *Republic*'s rational element, there too identified
with what is truly human rather than bestial in us
(588b10-589a4)) "leads us towards what is best and is in
control," we possess moderation
(*sophrosune*) (237e2-3). But when
"appetite drags us irrationally towards pleasures and rules in
us, its rule is called excess (*hubris*)"
(238a1-2). Of this excess, gluttony is one species, but erotic
love another (238b7-c4). This is the bad kind of love--Pandemotic
in the *Symposium*--that Lysias rightly disparages in the
speech Phaedrus admires and reads to Socrates (230e6-234c5).



In Socrates' view, however, there is also another kind of love,
namely, "the madness of a man who, on seeing beauty here on
earth, and being reminded of true beauty, becomes winged, and
fluttering with eagerness to fly upwards, but unable to leave the
ground, looks upwards like a bird, and takes no heed of things
below--and that is what causes him to be regarded as mad"
(249d5-e1). This madman is the philosopher of the *Symposium*,
who when he falls in love with a boy is led by his love to ascend by
stages to the form of the beautiful. What makes his madness a divine
gift, however, is that the ascent is now revealed as involving
recollection of a prior pre-natal ascent taken in the company of a
god.



From the rich literary account of this ascent, we need to take away
just one idea: souls have different psychological structures depending
on which god they followed, since this sets an upper limit on how much
of the forms they see, and so how much they can subsequently
recollect. Since gaining access to forms nourishes and strengthens the
rational element in the soul (248b5-c2), this also helps determine
their motivational structure: the stronger their reason is, the more
likely it will be to succeed in controlling the other elements in the
soul.



Followers of Zeus, for example, choose someone to love whose soul
resembles their patron god. So they seek someone who is
"naturally disposed to philosophy and leadership, and when they
have found him and fall in love they do everything to make him
philosophical" (252e1-5). Nonetheless, the falling itself
involves a huge psychological upheaval. The black horse of appetite
immediately urges towards sexual intercourse. The white
horse--"constrained then as always by shame"
(254a2)--holds itself back. Eventually, however, the black horse
forces both the charioteer and the white horse "to move towards
the beloved and mention to him the delights of sex"
(a5-7). Again they balk, "indignant at being forced to do
terrible and improper things" (b1). But finally, "when
there is no limit to their plight, they follow its lead, giving in and
agreeing to do what it tells them" (b2-3). As they come
close to the beloved, however, to initiate intercourse, the flashing
face of the beloved reminds the charioteer of the beautiful itself, so
that his memory "again sees it standing together with temperance
on a holy pedestal" (b5-7). He becomes frightened and
"in sudden reverence falls on his back, and is forced at the
same time to pull back the reins so violently as to bring the horses
down on their haunches, the one willingly, because of it lack of
resistance to him, but the unruly horse much against its will"
(b7-c3). Eventually, "when the same thing happens to the evil
horse many times, it allows the charioteer with his foresight to
lead" (e5-7). If this control of appetite by reason and
spirit continues--even when the boy has accepted his lover and
embraces, kisses, and lies down with him--and draws them to
"a well-ordered life and to philosophy," they are
blessedly happy here on earth, and, if they live such a life for three
successive incarnations, they re-grow their wings and re-join the
entourage of their god (255e2-b7).



When followers of Ares fall in love, on the other hand, they
"adopt a lower way of living, not philosophical, but
honor-loving" (256b7-c1). When they are drinking together, for
example, or are careless in some other way, "the licentious
horses in the two of them catch their souls off guard," and
since the man's recollection of beauty is dimmer and is not
rekindled by philosophical conversation, they end up having sex
together--something "the masses regard as the happiest
choice of all" (c1-5). Nonetheless, they don't have
sex very often, because "what they are doing has not been
approved by their whole mind" (c6-7). So while the degree
of their love and happiness is less than the philosophical pair and,
on their death, "they leave the body without wings," still
they have an impulse, coming from love, to try to gain them. Hence
they aren't punished in the next life, but helped on the way to
future happiness together (c7-e2).



The love that is divine madness is a good thing, therefore, especially
when, "accompanied by philosophical discussions (*erota
meta philosophon logon*)" (257b6), it leads to
the beautiful itself and the other forms, which are what we--as
most of all the rational element in our souls--truly love and
crave. The question is what makes a discussion philosophical? What
makes it of the sort to be included in the true art of love that the
philosopher who loves the beautiful itself practices? The answer now
proposed is that it must be a *techne* or craft, and so
must have the defining characteristics of one. As applied to love
itself, for example, it must begin with a definition of love, and
reach its conclusions by ordering its discussion in relation to it
(263d5-e3). And this definition, in turn, must be established by what
Socrates refers to as collection and division (266b3-4).



Collection is a process of "perceiving together and bringing
into one form items that are scattered in many places"
(265d3-4). It is a process that we, unlike other animals, are
able to engage in it, because our souls include a rational element
that has prior acquaintance with forms: "a soul that never
[prenatally] saw what is true cannot take a human shape, since a human
being must understand what is said by relation to a form that is
reached from many sense-perceptions being collected into one by
reasoning" (249b5-c1). (It is useful to compare this description
with the one given in Aristotle, *Posterior Analytics* II.
19.)



Once a form has been reached in this way, division begins. This is a
matter of "cutting the form up again, by relation to
[sub-]forms, by relation to its natural joints" (265e1-2). As an
example, Socrates cites the case of love itself:



> 
> just as a single body naturally has its parts in pairs, with both
> members of each pair having the same name, and labeled respectively
> left and right, so the two speeches regarded madness as naturally a
> single form in us. The one [Socrates' reorganized version of
> Lysias' attack on love] cut off the part on the left side, then
> cutting it again, and not giving up until it had found among the parts
> a love which is, as we say, "left-handed," and abused it
> with full justice, while the other speech [Socrates' own defense
> of love] led us to the parts of madness on the right-hand side, and
> discovering and exhibiting a love which shares the same name as the
> other, but is divine, it praised it as a cause of our greatest goods.
> (265e4-266b1)
> 



Thus, while each speech tells only half the story, the two together
show how correct division should proceed. The goal, however,
isn't just truth or correctness, but explanatory adequacy. Thus
if the form in question "is simple, we should
consider...what natural capacity it has for acting and on what,
or for being acted upon and by what," and if it is complex, we
should count its sub-forms, and consider the same things about them as
about the simple ones (270d3-7). That Socrates--the
archetypal searcher for explanatory definitions (*Euthyphro*
6d9-e6)--should pronounce himself "a lover of these
divisions and collections" is no surprise, therefore
(266b3-4).



Philosophy aims at true definitions and true stories based on them.
But it also aims at persuasion, since the philosophical lover wants to
persuade his boy to follow him on the path to the forms. Philosophy
and rhetoric must thus go together, which means that rhetoric, too,
must be developed as a *techne*. It must, first,
distinguish and give definitions of the various kinds of souls and
kinds of speeches, revealing their respective capacities and
susceptibilities, and, second, "coordinate each kind of soul
with the kind of speech appropriate to it, explaining why one kind of
soul is necessarily convinced by one kind of speech, while another is
not" (271b1-5). Mastery of such a science, however,
requires one further thing: "the student must observe these
things as they are in real life, and actually being put into practice,
and be able to follow them with keen perception" (d8-e1). It
isn't enough, in other words, to know what kinds of speeches
affect what kinds of soul, the philosophical rhetorician must also
know that this man in front of him is of such and such a kind, and be
able to talk in the kind of way that will prove convincing to him
(e2-272b2).


## 6. 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 (*techne*) a tragic poet is a
comic poet too" (223d2-6).



The key words here, as we learn in the *Ion*, are
*epistasthai* and *techne*. Ordinary poets cannot
write both comedy and tragedy, because they do not write out of
knowledge and craft (*techne*) but out of divine
inspiration (*Ion* 534c5-6). 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"
(817b1-5). 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.
(816d5-e5)



The *Laws* is a tragedy, then, because it is "an
imitation of the finest and best way of life."



The *Symposium* is a tragedy for an analogous reason: it
contains an imitation of one part of such a life, namely, what the
*Protagoras* terms a "symposium of beautiful and good
men" who "test each other's mettle in mutual
argument" by asking and answering questions (347d3-348a9).
This is how Socrates responds to Agathon's speech. It is how
Diotima converses with Socrates. It is the type of symposium Socrates
tries to re-establish when Alcibiades' "satyr-play"
is finished, and the throng of Bacchic revelers has left.



Unlike the *Laws*, however, the *Symposium* is a comedy
too, since it also contains an imitation of the second best kind of
symposium described in the *Protagoras*--one where there
are poets present, and where the participants "argue over points
that can't be established with any certainty"
(347e1-7). An accurate description, surely, of the speeches made
by all the symposiasts who speak prior to Socrates.



Finally, Alcibiades arrives with--significantly enough--a
flute-girl (212c5-e3; compare 176e6-7). 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"
(347c4-d2). This is the element of satyr-play in the
*Symposium*--satyr imagery is frequent in
Alcibiades'
 speech.[2]



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 (205d1-206a12). 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.