Lecture 3
Diotima, Socrates,
Alcibiades
Looking back: If Socrates’
attack on Agathon is right, then all the preceding speeches suffer from it. Many
shortcomings, internal incoherence, biases, individual points of view more than
explorations of ‘love.’ But each time also interesting aspects of the complex
phenomenon of love. All paint at best a partial picture of love and base their
praise and their recommendations on this picture. The aspects they leave out or
get wrong subvert their praise. If, that is, praise is to answer to the
constraint that the recipient of praise can rely on and emulate the object of
praise. We have so many different points of view. They are understandable as
points of views of the specific characters that introduce these views: Phaedrus
the eager student, Pausanias the flaming gay, Eryximachus the doctor in need of
a practical model, Aristophanes the writer of comedies who displays deep
intuitive grasp of the human soul; Agathon, the writer of successful tragedies
who only wants to speak beautifully and his audience to admire or follow him
because of the beauty of his words. (Strong implicit criticism of Agathon’s
idea of tragic!)
Now Diotima – the woman leads
the charge. Or: Socrates speaks as woman.
0 Organization
Preparation in dialogue:
Diotima removes a prejudice
Socrates had: Love is neither beautiful nor good. Love is a dynamic principle between
the eternal and the temporal realms.
Speech part II: Object of
love, and what it means for lover.
Speech Part III.: Purpose of
love: give birth in beauty.
Speech Part IV.: Love has
desire for immortality.
Speech Part V.: Normative
order of types focusing on one or the other kind of love.
Speech Part VI.: The ladder
of love.
Speech part VII.: The Idea of
Love.
Alcibiades:
Characterization of
Alcibiades through scene
Alicbiades’ encomium:
the past
the present and meaning of his speech.
Ironical Coda.
1. The Idea of Love
Best to analyze her long and
intransparent contribution from the end. My presentation moves through Diotima’s
contributions backward. Diotima leads Socrates and the reader on a path that
culminates in the ‘Idea of Beauty.’ The Idea of beauty she calls “the goal of
loving” (210E.6). ‘Eros’/Love leads us upwards on a path through different
kinds of love for different kinds of beauty. The trajectory is there for the
sake of and driven by the Idea of Beauty (211C.2). The purpose and essence of
love is to lead us on a trajectory through different kinds of beauty to
acquaintance with the Idea of Beauty itself.
The Idea of Beauty and
Platonic Ideas:
Goal and highest point of the
ascent is “the sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature”
(210E.5-7). Beauty – pure – is an item of the kind of idea. The sight of the
idea of beauty is the sight of the most beautiful.
As idea ‘Beauty’ is
“absolute, pure, unmixed” (211E.1-2); “Beauty itself by itself with itself, …
always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in it” (211B.2).
Plato thinks there is a special kind of reality, different from the reality of
our senses and the mundane reality in which we live: the world of ideas. Ideas
are a special kind of existing item. Plato’s ‘Idealism.’
‘Idea’ ontology: Each idea –
beauty, the good, justice – is a unit that unites in it all the features of those
concepts, and nothing but those features. Wherever there is something beautiful
in our world – a specific form of beauty - it never is the idea, because
for each beautiful mundane item, there are mixed into it elements that do not
belong to beauty, and the beauty of the beautiful mundane item is always in
“another thing” (211A.10). The beauty in the mundane forms is always less than
perfect beauty: relative (not absolute); impure (not pure); mixed (not unmixed
or homogeneous); plural (not “one form”); subject to change (eternal and
unchanging); incomplete (and not complete); partial (and not ; compromised.
Ideas are what is common to
the many of which one can predicate the idea: ▪horse▪, ▪triangle▪.
That’s also called “universal.” But ideas are also dynamic active and passive
principles: they are the driving force in all beautiful things. All beautiful
things share in the idea of beauty. Being items, entities, units that are
bounded against each other and do not depend on others to be and to be what they
are, ideas are “by themselves.” They are “with themselves,” not because they
are not part of a reality where each idea or form has others next to it, but
because everything, that is ‘with’ the idea is an integral and necessary part
of the form. Nothing foreign or inessential is mixed into its being. More
important than the ontology is the dynamic function ideas have towards our
mundane reality.
Dynamic functions of ideas:
Plato hypostasizes concepts (i.e. concepts as real beings). Idea-items into
active beings. In addition to being, ideas also do things! They let
things be what they are, and what we encounter them as: some as humans, others
as animals, some attitudes as love, others as hatred, etc. confer whatness to
the beings of our mundane reality. Those beings may be mixed, relative and
otherwise be imperfect. But each quality and each relation we ascribe to them
uses ideas. Plato thinks of ideas as forces, too: they come to and into mundane
things, giving to the things their essence and their qualities. They are at
work in us, orienting us. This is why the things ‘share’ in the ideas (211B.2).
Ideas can do this as a work of sorts, but without getting into the mundane
reality they contribute to fashion. (Problems for theory of ideas). From this
point of view, love is the drive in us to get hold of the idea of beauty. This
is the ultimate goal. All the minor forms leave the soul ultimately
unsatisfied. (~Aristophanes!)
Diotima uses the idea of
beauty for several purposes in her speech. The idea as ultimate goal of love
organizes and hierarchizes different pursuits of love and assigns to them
places in her order of values. The closer to the Idea of love a specific love
and a specific type of beauty pursued through that love are, the more worthy
that love is. This hierarchy has been called ‘the ladder of love.’ A
second ordering function is more implicit. The idea of love orders the
different speeches and assigns to them the positive and negative features we
have been discussion running through them. A third function: love as pursuit of
ideal beauty includes as more specialized pursuits the two main subordinate
purposes we pursue through love of beautiful things, namely “to give birth in
beauty’ and to pursue immortality.
2. Hierarchy of types:
Going backward in Diotima’s
speech, we first encounter the hierarchy between domains. They are the fields
of ‘body,’ ‘soul,’ and collectives (cities and households). Different people
are differently drawn to objects belonging into one or the other of these domains,
and love means something different in each of them. Love for bodies, love in
body would be love for the beauty of bodily pleasure and offspring (208E.3-5).
Love of soul – both the loving soul and love for beauty in another soul.
Soul-related beauty will lie in what that love tries to achieve – wisdom,
virtue (209A.5) The love for collectives will be the beauty in the “proper
ordering” of cities or households (209A.7) guided by moderation and justice.
What is the hierarchy?
Different personalities are differently drawn to one or the other object of
love. Diotima clearly indicates that those who work on the proper ordering of
cities are the highest in rank, those who work on the soul are next, and those
who find their love in the love of bodies are lowest. But, this is how people
are. They have different leanings and different competences. At this place, the
hierarchy is more a social ranking than an ordering of kinds of love, although
the rank is determined by what individuals love to predominantly do/choose to
make their main concern. The bases of the ranking remain the things people are
in fact drawn to. Arguments in favor? Interesting quantitative argument: offer
more to share, work for more!
One may wonder why those concerned
with the collective have a higher rank than those concerned with having
families and contribute children to the community. Diotima is not a
value-democrat. (Aristophanes looked like one!). Another problem with the
social ranking: It is not difficult to love the body and one’s family, to love
the souls of those in one’s social neighborhood, and to be concerned with the
right order of our communities. This is the ideal of the good citizen. Not so
clear what the hierarchy consists in, for different people are differently
drawn to love in one or the other domain.
3. The ladder of love:
Scrutiny also discovers a
deeper kind of hierarchy, even more normative than the social hierarchy of
concerns and types of citizen. Diotima seems to say what Pausanias emphasized
and Aristophanes implicitly contested. She says: one ought to love the
community and its good order more than the soul and its beauty (noble,
well-formed - 209B.8), and the soul more than the body and the kinds of love
anchored in the body. “The beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the
beauty of their bodies” (210B.7).
She even addresses the body
as a polluter. (211E.2). This ranking of loves themselves is cast in universal
terms. Everybody ought to ... Now it would be false to think Diotima says: Let
people not love the body, and love the soul instead. That would be Pausanias’
device. The idea of love in its purity is not like an imperative that says: Do
this, and don’t do that. The idea of love determines a trajectory, which the one
who pursues beauty needs to run through. I will raise the question ‘what
happens to the stages one leaves behind?’ in a moment.
The trajectory of the one who
is initiated into the rites of love:
First: love one body and
beget beautiful ideas there (210A.8)
Next: several, then all
beautiful bodies.
Then: beauty in souls more
precious than beauty in body (210B.6). Gives birth to beautiful ideas that will
make young men better.
Then: Beauty of/in activities
and laws. All this akin to itself (?). Will think beauty of body is slight.
Next: learn to see the beauty of various kinds
of knowledge.
Next: Turning to all the
different kinds of beauty. Gives rise to ideas about them, their connections
and the place they occupy in the overall collection of beauties.
Final: acquaintance with the
Idea of Beauty.
Observations on the ladder:
The first move is an
expansion, but also an internal transformation of love: the beauties of all
beautiful bodies is brother to the beauty of every other. The step is not
towards abstraction – the idea of corporeal beauty, the same for all bodies –
embodied, let us say, in a statue.
The expansion is
pluralization: all the beautiful bodies are differently beautiful. But, to the
one who pursues beauty, everything that exhibits beauty has the same
attraction. The station on the trajectory towards the encounter with the pure
idea of beauty requires pluralization of one’s love for the beautiful body. Don
Giovanni? Or: interest in the beautiful body is not desiring to possess it or
be possessed by it! Overcome the “wild gaping after just one body” (210B.5) Two
questions: (1) Does that mean that I will desire all the beautiful bodies I
encounter in the same way in which I desired just one? (2) Does that mean that,
because I love all the beautiful bodies with the same kind of love that I will
desire neither – ultimate sublimation together with pluralization? In
both cases something important changes. Loss, or gain, or both? Also: The
varieties of beauty in bodies is also the discovery that they all share
something: beauty. “From one body to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies”
(211C.4).
If we want to understand the
value hierarchy of the different kinds and domains of love we need to answer
the question: What happens to the lower states when the adept moves on to the
higher stages? Or better: Once the journey has reached its goal, what happens
to the beauties and loves that have been left behind during the journey?
Already mentioned: one can have a family, and be an educator of souls, and
be concerned with the good order of one’s community. Looking at the trajectory
we are examining here: When I move from the gaping after one body, or from
bodies to soul, or from loving concern for the soul of individuals to concern
for the order of the community, what happens to the earlier stages? In the
first place: Diotima says you need to move through the stages. You ought not to
leap ahead to the higher ones before you have experienced the earlier ones.
Two readings of Diotima’s
speech, not necessarily incompatible:
A religious reading (as ascent towards final goal, purification, leaving behind
lower forms.
Leave behind what was loved,
and the kind of love of the lower stage? The lower stage would then be merely
transitory, a stepping-stone to the higher stage, an older skin, to be shed by
the person who grows in love. If that is Diotima’s meaning she propagates an
ideal of sublimation and renunciation: Sublimate your lower desires into higher
love. Give up the love and the satisfaction you may have gained from the lower
loves. A refined and transformed version of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ love articulated
in Pausanias. Love for the body needs to be overcome in favor of love for the
soul. Each time you leave behind a form of love that is more distant from the
idea of love. Your approach is initiation into acquaintance with pure love. The
way of the Buddha! Christian attitudes towards physical love. Diotima seems to
articulate the idea of sublimation and increasing purification of love when she
summarizes the “mystery of love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this
Beauty [i.e. the idea of beauty], starting out from beautiful things and using
them like rising stairs” (211C.1-211D.1). And “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” (211E.1). An ascetic ideal?
An integrative reading (mundane utopia, enrichment, sovereignty and
integration):
Think that what needs to be
left behind is just and only, each time, that element in love that does not
participate in pure beauty. That would be, in love of the body, the fascination
with just the body: the “gaping after just one body” in Diotima’s words. But
maintain love for the body inasmuch that love is not in the way of love for the
soul and the community. Not let oneself be taken over by passion, or lust, but
allow ‘the right kind of love for the body.” (What would that be?) Only to
learn to not let any kind of supremacy of just one form or one kind of love be
dominant and be an impediment for the others: “not to be looking at beauty in a
single example – as a servant would . . . (being a slave he is low and
small-minded) – but the lover is turned to the great sea of beauty, and,
gazing upon this, he gives birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and
theories . . . (210D.1-6; my emphasis). Perhaps leave behind, in love for the
soul the exclusion of the body and disregard for the community. Each time, the
thing to be abandoned is exclusiveness and dominance of the partial. But only
that! Abandonment of ‘lower loves’ vs. abandonment of lowly ways of
loving in earlier stages of love. The integrative reading overcomes the
hierarchy of types because a person who succeeds in integration will not
practice just one of the mundane forms at the expense of others.
Can we decide between the
two? Does Plato favor one? Should we favor one? I think the integrative mundane
model is to be favored, at least in mundane practice, whereas the religious,
transcendent model is the one Diotima dreams of, but does not think is
realizable. Quasi-saintly idea of love! But also devaluation of corporeal love
in the religious reading. Background to Christian devaluation of body. Idea
leads and orients in right kind of integration and understanding of partiality.
Accessible to humans? Heuristic ideal?
4. Criteria for love and
beauty:
The initiation (by self or
other – comp 211C.1)) that leads love/lead by love towards acquaintance with
the Idea of Beauty presupposes that all the stages and phases are love. Same
problem as for Eryximachus and the others: what lets all of them be cases of
love? The metaphysical answer: They all participate in the Idea of Beauty.
Unsatisfactory, because purely formal. For, what is it to participate in the
idea? What unites all the different form in such a way that they can be
arranged into a path along different phenomena or manifestations of beauty
towards the most perfect beauty and love?
Diotima makes two moves to
secure that everything she lists in her steps is a form of love for a beautiful
thing: (a) to love is to give birth in beauty (206B.9); (b) to love is to
desire immortality (207A.4). But first, she points to the fact that our
language is insufficient. “We divide out a special kind of love, and we refer
to it by a word that means the whole – ‘love’; and for the other kinds of love
we use other words” (205B.5-7). Then she offers a formula that is meant to
cover all the different forms of love, and thereby brings them together under
one complex concept – something the other models were unable to do.
Diotima, after elucidating
the object of love, introduces the “real purpose of love:”
(a) “It is giving birth in
beauty, whether in body or soul” (206B.9-10). Obviously ‘love in beauty’ is
opposed to ‘love wants/desires beauty’ or “love is wanting to possess . . .” (206A.12),
an idea Socrates uses in his dialogue with Agathon. What does Diotima mean by
the formula? Does love for the body give birth in beauty? Is even giving birth
– literally understood – ‘in beauty,’ thinking of all the suffering and
mess that accompanies it? “Beauty,” Diotima says, “releases women from their
great pain” (206E.1) Are laws and institutions ‘beautiful?’ If so – in which
ways? ‘In beauty’ is compatible with messiness!
Let us take up the terms in
order: to give birth, birthing: to bring something into the world that has not
existed before and assumes an independent life. Diotima rejects the idea that
love is the desire to possess, to get to possess the beautiful thing one is
attracted by. The purpose of love is not to possess, but to – generate, in the
way of birthing. Taking the term in a large enough sense, activities, laws,
civic orders, but also ideas are generated by us. Perhaps better: create? To
generate in the way of birthing is a special kind of generation. The transition
is from the inside to the outside, from gestation to delivery, from delivery to
nurture of the newborn into independent life. The steps of Diotima’s ladder all
have this element. Not all handling of ideas or law is of that kind. Love is
only or predominantly in the birthing relation. To give birth, here, to bring
something into the world, something new, formed at the inside, and bring it to
independent life and fruition.
The metaphor goes further:
Birthing presupposes pregnancy and pregnancy presupposes impregnation. Who or
what is the impregnating element that leads to pregnancy? The search for the
forms of beauty will not be it. Thesis: It is the Idea of Beauty as a dynamic
principle. Beauty desires for human souls to become acquainted with it. (In
another function the Idea of Beauty is also the cause of the beautiful things
we encounter and can learn to love.)
The thought that the idea
is the impregnating factor for our love for beautiful things is also a clue
for an understanding of Diotima’s thesis that love is not a god but a spirit,
an “in between” (202D.14) The “shuttling back and forth” now turns out not
to be just between the mundane lover and the beautiful thing he/she loves,
but between the Idea of Beauty and the soul of the lover. The two relations
exist side by side, inextricably linked, and dominated by the Idea of Beauty.
From Beauty to the lover: The idea of Beauty inseminates the soul of the lover
with the interest in beautiful things, and at the same time with a desire
to reach acquaintance with the form, the idea of Beauty itself. This is one
way between the Idea and the lover. From the lover to Beauty: The other way
of the “shuttling” is to learn to love everything that is beautiful and thereby
participate in the Idea of Beauty, and to learn that this is a path towards
gaining a gaze in pure Beauty. This is why the messenger can be said to “round
out the whole and bind fast the all to all” (202E.7). To be ‘in-between’ is
to be a ‘go-between’ – moreover a go between that serves as the arm of the
agents between whom it shuttles. They are the lover and the Idea of Love.
Next: to give birth in
beauty. What does “in beauty” here mean? Footnote 79 on p. 53 seems to me
to get things wrong. ‘In-ness’ is neither inside the person who gives birth,
nor the fact that a beautiful person is present. The “in” in “in beauty” is
like the “in” of “to believe in friendship,” or “to partake in a rite.” In both
cases the one who does something “in …” performs something that places the
agent inside the scope of something, here inside the scope of friendship and
ritual. We say: “he/she is all into …” The believer in friendship places
his activity inside the scope of the value of friendship. The participant in
the rite places himself inside the community that binds itself together by
performing the rite. The birthing of love is and ought to be inside the scope
of beauty. Beauty is thus a modality, and at the same time a value realized
by/in/through the birthing. How does one place one’s loving activity inside the
scope of beauty? By letting one’s loving be oriented, motivated and constrained
by the Idea of Beauty, pure beauty. “… in beauty is thus a mode of
participation. The participation is in the Idea of Beauty. How are the mundane
activities of love-making, delivering a child, educating an adolescent,
practicing the tasks of a member of a community participating in the Idea of
Beauty? That is the case if and when these activities are performed as steps
towards the Idea of Beauty. Not every activity that claims to love does that.
Alcibiades, for example, seduces to exert his power over Socrates. His ‘love’
would be love of power, for Diotima: Love for the purpose of power, and
therefore neither a case of birthing nor of ‘in beauty.’ Socrates, on the other
hand, in the scene (219B.3-where the two sleep together under the cloak,
corporeally together but not making love.)
But when is a love ‘birthing
in beauty?’ What are the criteria for an activity to be beautiful by “being
done correctly?” (210A.2 and 210A.6). They are never spelled out in detail,
also because they are supposed to draw on the Idea of Love, and there is no
clear image of that idea. But we can glance a couple of criteria: Negative: no
self-interest; pleasure and satisfaction tied to beauty itself – a certain
‘formality’ as distinct from physicalness; in each field (body, soul,
education, community) that which ties together the units prone to be in discord
or distance: harmonizes them in communal
forms and rites (compare the formula from 202E.7: “rounds out and binds all to
all.” Freud’s ‘Eros’); an element of mutuality and reciprocity (see Alcibiades
at 222B.3, and recall Pausanias’ ethics of ‘justified conquest’ for contrast).
But also, in each of the ‘lower’ forms the simultaneous pursuit of the ‘higher’
forms – again documented by Alcibiades. It is because he could not conquer
Socrates’ body by using his, Alcibiades’ beauty as a bait, Socrates was able to
educate Alcibiades and tie Alcibiades to himself in friendship and acceptance
of status as disciple. Each form ‘on its way towards …’ (Generalizable? If
generalized the attitude becomes monastic!)
(b) Immortality
Diotima puts forward a second
purpose for love. “Love must desire immortality.” (207A.4). An amazing,
counterintuitive claim. Immortality of the lover? Of the beloved? Of the
love-relation? Of the individuals, their groups, the species? Here, Diotima
seems to make a quasi-biological, at least a naturalistic claim: love, in
natures of the kind of life, aims at immortality. For individuals, immortality
is unattainable. But Diotima points to reproduction. Reproduction gives
duration to the species under conditions of mortality of specimens. Let us not
think along Darwinian lines, where species also originate and die out. (The
ancients did not believe that species were equally an ephemeral kind of item).
So, continued reproduction confers immortality to biological species. But,
reading carefully what Diotima says, this is not her point in 207D2-207E.4.
Bodily love, in its reproductive aspect is a renewal of the mortal individual
in his/her offspring. The idea of generations and their lines being a unit, as
it were, one long serial being, realized in instances that pass away and
renewing themselves. This is of course a line that can come to an end for an
individual serial being. But each event of reproduction could be understood as
manifesting the desire for individual immortality. (Compare to and contrast
with Aristophanes’ desire to return to original unity).
Diotima extends her idea of
immortality to knowledge and the pursuit of virtues, exemplified by seeking
glory. I do not think her argument is very persuasive, because preservation and
immortality are not the same thing. Preservation can easily by finite in
purpose and desire. Socrates, by the way, calls her reasoning “in the manner of
a perfect sophist” (208C2).
Summary:
In the bizarre form of the
‘ladder of ascent’ where (a) different types and different forms of love are
steps on a journey towards acquaintance with the Idea of Love, and (b) that
idea is at the same time an end of the journey and (c) the driving force along
that journey, and (d) an imperfect ingredient in each of the different forms
Diotima manages to make a proposal that, if successful, achieves a number of
things the other speeches do not achieve.
1.
She gives a
successful idea of ‘true love’ or of the ‘truth of love’ by anchoring that
truth in the Idea of beauty, and the purpose of ‘birthing in beauty.’
2.
She organizes the
disparate and seemingly unconnected forms of love we have encountered on our
trip through the text into one dynamic model.
3.
She proposes a
model that is normative and factual at the same time.
4.
Her model
overcomes the gaps that separate ‘love of/for the body,’ ‘love for the soul
(‘Platonic love’ (?)), ‘love of knowledge and wisdom,’ ‘love of one’s
community,’ ‘love of self’ vs. ‘love of the other,’ ‘male-gendered
(self-control, other-domination) love’ vs. female (other-nurturing,
self-abandonment) love. Binding them together without omitting and negating
their differences.
5.
She offers a clue
for the understanding of the other speeches: Each of them represents an
idiosyncratic version of a form of love, from the background inspired by the
Idea of love, but distorted by conditions of mundane reality.
6.
She offers a
basis for the evaluation of what in those speeches is falling short or away
from the Idea of Love and the right kind of birthing, and what in them
represents ‘giving birth in beauty.’ (Most of the things my discussion has been
critical of will also appear in a negative light from the point of view of
Diotima’s model).
Problems
I have with her:
(a)
The leading end and
value ‘Idea of Beauty’ remains undeveloped, and needs to remain undeveloped
given the epistemic status of Platonic ideas.
(b) The effort to bind all the forms into one model is
accompanied by a devaluation of bodily love. There remains an exclusiveness of the
kind: if you value highly the loves of the body you do not have the correct
relation to the other forms of love. My own inclinations: I am not certain I
agree with the hierarchy of values Diotima uses (e.g. soul over body); the idea
that strong motivation by one form must be at the expense of motivation by the
other seems to me to not be universally justified. A certain ascetism.
(c)
There is
something too smooth, overly synthetic, even ascetic in the model as a whole,
particularly visible in the religious reading of increasing sublimation and
renunciation. Tensions disappear in what she represents as the natural and
correct way of learning how to love. I can imagine less demanding, and less
hierarchizing kinds of integration. (Mozart as possible example).
(d) Where is the element of struggle between the
non-birthing and the birthing drives in us? Is Alcibiades perhaps appearing as
a reminder that it is not just the goodwill and accepted guidance by the Idea
of Beauty that promotes ‘giving birth in beauty’ but the very existence of the
ugly penchants when they meet the other tendencies head-on? That strife is the
medium of the journey, not following the voice of beauty in us or in the
leader? (210A.8). Isn’t Diotima’s myth about the birth of love – this must be the
mundane varieties, because the Idea of Love’ is eternal and timeless – also
pointing in the direction of a positive role of those elements Diotima’s model
downgrades? Mundane love is born from Penia (poverty, indigence, neediness) and
Poros (resourcefulness, the ability and cleverness to find a way to achieve
one’s ends). Does it not look as if Penia raped Poros in his sleep? Diotima
would readily consent that there may be poverty in wisdom and resourcefulness
in acquiring wisdom, the mundane in-betweenness thus playing inside her scheme
of values. But do those who have distinguished good and bad love not have a
point that bad love also needs to be integrated into the job of loving in the
right way?
The
Symposium does not leave us with the one, right, kind of love. Neither is it
skeptical and relativistic.