Plato has no philosophy of love

Socrates just wants to teach

The Book:

Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws
Translated by Stanley Lombardo, Paul Woodruff and Alexander Nehamas, D. S. Hutchinson, and C. D. C. Reeve
Edited by C. D. C. Reeve
Hackett Publishing
2006

The Talk:

In Plato on Love C. D. C. Reeve brings together Plato’s dialogues related to the topic of love. In Plato’s dialogues the primary paradigm for love—what it’s for, what it wants, what it looks like and feels like—is the romantic relationship between an adult male Athenian and a teenage boy.

The idealized story goes something like this: As a boy grows from puberty to adolescence he starts to attract the attention of an older man. The boy ignores him at first, but notices the man hovering nearby. His friends tell him to stay away from the man. The man starts to send him gifts. The man invites him to watch sports or the theatre together. The man may even sing him songs. The boy continues to play coy. But eventually, the man confesses his all-consuming love and the boy falls in love with the man.

As a romantic pair, the older man acts as a sponsor or mentor for the boy, helping him out and teaching him how to be a good Athenian man. They are a couple until the boy starts to grow a beard, get married, and start a family. The two men remain close friends for the rest of their lives but are no longer in a relationship.

Women are almost entirely absent in this world. They exist only as entertainers (a “flute girl” enters at the end of Symposium) and courtesans. And even courtesans are marginal. An Athenian man who has sex with women for pleasure is considered someone who lacks all taste, class, or discernment. (You’re so randy you’re even attracted to women!) Marriage is purely functional for procreation, and the less said about it, the better, Plato’s characters seem to suggest.

Challenging the paradigm

This is the context in which Plato’s dialogues unfold.

• In Lysis, Socrates models for his lovesick friend the right way attract a boy.

• In Alcibiades, Socrates is in love with a boy and attempts to win him over to philosophy (and thus to himself).

• In Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus debate if a boy should choose as a lover a man who truly loves him or a man who doesn’t.

• Symposium involves a series of speeches on love that end abruptly with Alcibiades, now Socrates’ ex-lover, crashing the party and insulting (but also ironically praising) Socrates in front of the party guests.

This context is important because Socrates (and therefore Plato) speaks within this romantic paradigm while also being ultimately uncomfortable with bodily sexual activity. This is a delicate matter for both fictional Socrates and real-life Plato because Socrates was executed specifically for corrupting the youth. Behind these dialogues, then, are questions about what Socrates was up to and Plato’s defense of Socrates.

Ultimately, Plato has to come up with a rhetorically satisfying account of Socrates that both challenges social norms and doesn’t challenge social norms at the same time. In these dialogues, then, Socrates picks and chooses from the romantic paradigm of his time, keeping the pedagogical and mentorlike parts and rejecting (or omitting) the overtly sexual and bodily parts.

First, let’s look at what seems to be Plato’s preferences for love, then Socrates’ account of love in Symposium, and finally the implications for Plato’s philosophy of love (if he really has one).

Plato’s preference

Reeve’s inclusion of his own translations of excerpts from Republic and Laws are critical for filling in the picture of Plato’s views. In these two dialogues Plato lays out his ideal society without compromises. Plato writes in Republic the following rules for his philosopher-kings:

It seems, then, that you will lay it down as a law in the city we are founding that a lover—if he can persuade his boyfriend to let him—may kiss him, be with him, and touch him, as a father would a son, for the sake of beautiful things. But, in all other respects, his association with the one he cares about must never seem to go any further than this.

In Laws male-male relationships are forbidden entirely and sexual activity is narrowly circumscribed:

Our citizens musn’t be inferior to birds or beasts, who are born into large flocks and, until the time comes for them to breed, live celibate, pure, and chaste lives. Then, when they reach that age, they pair off as they please, male with female and female with male, and for the remaining time live in a pious and just manner, firmly committed to the initial agreements constituting their friendship.

Plato’s preference is clearly celibacy in both these texts with erotic activity existing at the minimum possible necessary.

In Phaedrus, Plato describes the climactic moment of two lovers coming together and presents them with a critical decision: Will they give into their higher/better selves, abstain from physical activity, and do philosophy together? Or will they give into their lower/worse selves and engage in physical activity instead?

“Now if the victory goes to the better elements in both their minds” they will ascend in the afterlife to a higher level where they will behold the “ultimate vision” of The Good and experience infinite bliss.

Alternatively, if they decide “to commit that act which ordinary people would take to be the happiest choice of all” it will take them tens of thousands of more years to experience ultimate bliss in the afterlife.

It’s an either/or option: Philosophy or sex.

The most vivid account of Socrates’ sexual avoidance comes from Alcibiades’ account in Symposium of his romance with Socrates. (Alcibiades is considered one of the most handsome boys in Athens.) Alcibiades grows ever more infatuated with Socrates, flipping the script so to speak, as he becomes the boy pursuing the man. After many attempts, Alcibiades slips into Socrates’ bed and thinks he’s finally going to have the encounter he wants.

I slipped underneath the cloak and put my arms around this man—this utterly unnatural, this truly extraordinary man—and spent the whole night next to him. Socrates, you can’t deny a word of it. But in spite of all my efforts, this hopelessly arrogant, this unbelievably insolent man—he turned me down! He spurned my beauty, of which I was so proud, members of the jury—for this is really what you are: you’re here to sit in judgment of Socrates’ amazing arrogance and pride. Be sure of it. I swear to you by all the gods and goddesses together, my night with Socrates went no further than if I had spent it with my own father or older brother!

Outside of sexual activity, Socrates’ revulsion of the body is well-established. Throughout the dialogues Plato describes bodies in a negative way. In Phaedrus:

That was the ultimate vision, and we saw it in pure light because we were pure ourselves, not buried in this thing we are carrying around now, which we call a body, locked in it like an oyster in a shell.

In Symposium:

But how would it be, in our view, if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form?

While there are references where Socrates finds boys beautiful or attractive, there’s only one context in which it’s given: Socrates is spurred by their looks to want to dialogue with them, i.e., to teach them philosophy.

The only way Beauty can be seen

Socrates is a man with only one thing on his mind: Philosophy. Philosophy is a developmental dialogue (known as elenchus) that leads an individual to knowledge of The Good. It requires two people: The questioner and the answerer. The questioner is the guide that leads the answerer toward knowledge. Speech is the medium by which soul connects to soul, and it is the medium by which philosophy happens. From Alcibiades:

So the right way of looking at it is that, when you and I talk to each other, one soul uses words to address another soul.

Bodies are something you have, souls are what you are.

If there was someone who loved Alcibiades’ body, he wouldn’t be loving Alcibiades, only something that belonged to Alcibiades.

Thus, the soul-soul connection of talking with someone is far more profound than knocking bodies together. Laws:

[The higher self] desires what is really soul with what is really soul, and regards the satisfaction of body by body as lewdness.

So what Socrates wants to do is talk with people. And whatever the topic of discussion is, Socrates wants to turn it toward philosophy. He is perpetually on the prowl for an answerer that he can speech with, that he can engage in a developmental dialogue. This is what Socrates lives for (and eventually dies for).

So when it’s Socrates’ turn to give a speech in praise of love in Symposium, it’s clear that what Socrates wants to do is to talk about philosophy itself. (Can he do anything else?) He describes love as a desire to reproduce, to give birth. “All of us are pregnant,” he says, “both in body and in soul.” What we truly desire, however, is to give birth into something beautiful. We seek out a beautiful person to give birth into. Those who are pregnant “in soul” find a beautiful body and “beget beautiful speeches.” It is this act, the begetting of beautiful speech, that leads one up the famous ladder of love—from the specific to the general to the universal to The Good.

Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven’t you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen—only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he’s in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty).

As I understand this passage, when Socrates says “the only way that Beauty can be seen” he is referring to the speech between a man and a boy, i.e. the developmental dialogue. This squares with everything Socrates expresses elsewhere, and it wouldn’t make any sense if he meant looking at handsome boys or, yikes, being physical with them.

When I first read Symposium years ago I read it as something like “love for one thing leads us to love things generally which leads us to love eternal things and thus leads us to the divine.” Plato is thus blessing human love, sacralizing love, redeeming love as a way of reaching our ultimate desire, The Good, God. Elenchus by other means.

But reading it again, and in the broader context of Plato’s dialogues, it seems clear that the activity that leads us upward is not love but spoken dialogue, a specific kind of progressive dialogue. Socrates is describing his pattern of pedagogical practice that he performs in each of Plato’s works. If you aren’t doing the elenchus, you aren’t on the way. And the elenchus is speech, the only means by which soul communes with soul.

Teaching us a lesson

Which brings us to an important question: Is Socrates’ speech in Symposium about love at all—in any sense that we mean it conventionally? Or is Socrates simply trying to guide us from love toward philosophy? Socrates concludes his speech in the following way, and to me it sounds like the most perfunctory, damning-with-faint-praise, CYA conclusion ever:

Human nature can find no better workmate for acquiring this than Love. That’s why I say that every man must honor Love, why I honor the rites of Love myself and practice them with special diligence, and why I commend them to others. Now and always I praise the power and courage of Love so far as I am able. Consider this speech, then, Phaedrus, if you wish, a speech in praise of Love. Or if not, call it whatever and however you please to call it.

😮

This is my read: Socrates is trapped. He’s not interested in love. He only cares about philosophy. But he wants to be a polite guest. So he takes this paradigm of romantic Athenian love and pulls out the mentoring aspect of it, the older man educating the boy in virtue. That’s the part Socrates latches onto, the education, the teaching, the mentoring—the developmental dialogue. From that starting point, he fills out the rest of his image of love. Philosophical speech becomes the medium for the “procreation” of wisdom and the “ecstasy” of the ultimate vision.

If you’ve ever been a teacher, it’s the default teacher move. What are you into? What do you like? You like football? Ok, let me explain fractions in football terms. I want to teach you fractions. You want to talk about football. So let me find a way to lead you in my direction. In this specific situation, Socrates is meeting his fellow Athenians where they are at. He’s not endorsing where they are at, he’s simply using it as a platform for getting them interested in philosophy.

Why does this matter? I don’t think Plato has a philosophy of love. I’m not even sure Socrates was trying to describe love at all in Symposium. And even if he was, he describes it almost exclusively in terms of the mentor-mentee aspect of the Athenian man-boy romantic relationship, which is not really generalizable to other forms of love. It’s very specific to ancient Athens.

This has implications for platonism generally, where (as I understand it) human desire plays a central role in leading one toward the divine. Think Augustine’s “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Plutarch’s love of Laura leading him to God. Iris Murdoch saying the love of excellent things leads us to The Good.

Would Plato agree?

My sense is Plato would say: Love and beauty lead to The Good if and only if they trigger the elenchus dialogue between a teacher and a student. If it doesn’t do that, I ain’t interested. We may believe in elenchus by other means, Plato does not. Perhaps we have taken his rhetorical or pedagogical move as some kind of blessing of human desire, but this runs counter to Plato’s views repeated ad nauseam elsewhere.

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