Core_09_Plato_Lect 2

Symposium: “Diotima Questions Socrates” and “The Speech of Diotima”

Diotima and Socrates.

The preceding speeches suffer from untruth. They turn to only one aspect, leaving out others. Individual points of view more than explorations of ‘love.’ Each time also Highlighting interesting partial 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 essence of love has not been articulated. Their shortcomings damage their praise.

Now Diotima – the woman leads the charge. Or: Socrates speaks as woman.

Organization

Diotima questions Socrates:

Diotima removes a prejudice Socrates had: Love is neither beautiful nor good. It is an in-between and a go-between, a dynamic principle between the realms of the atemporal and the temporal.

Diotima’s Speech Part I: Myth of Love’s birth and nature (202B4-204B9). Role of lover more important than role of beloved (204B10-204C8).

Speech part II: Object of love, and what it means for lover (204C9-206B4).

Speech Part III.: Purpose of love: give birth in beauty (206B5-207A4).

Speech Part IV.: Love has desire for immortality. (207A5-208E2).

Speech Part V.: Normative order of types focusing on one or the other kind of love (208E3-209E5).

Speech Part VI.: The ladder of love (209E6-211A1.

Speech part VII.: The Idea of love (211A3-212B1).

Socrates’ conclusion (212B2-212C3)

The Idea of Love

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” (210E6). ‘Eros’/love leads us upwards on a path through different kinds of love for different kinds of beauty. The ascent is due to 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” (211E1-2); “Beauty itself by itself with itself, … always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in it” (211B2). 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” (211A10). 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 the many things of which one can predicate the idea participate in: ▪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,” because everything, that Belongs to the idea is an integral and necessary part of the form. Nothing foreign or inessential is mixed into an idea’s 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 be otherwise 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, for example in the idea of the good. This is why the things ‘share’ in the ideas (211B.2). 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 love, the more worthy that love is. This hierarchy has been called ‘the ladder of love.’ A second ordering 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.

Hierarchy of types of love:

Going backward in Diotima’s speech, we first encounter a 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 (208E3-5). 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 attain – wisdom, virtue (209A5) The love for collectives will be the beauty in the “proper ordering” of cities or households (209A7) guided by moderation and justice.

What organizes 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 in that hierarchy, 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? Quantitative argument- offer more to share, work for more? Also a hierarchy in the good: the good of/for the body is a lesser good than that of/for the soul.

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 who is also a good person.

The ladder of love:

A deeper hierarchy, more normative than the social hierarchy of concerns and types of citizen. Diotima seems to assert that one ought to love the community and its good order more than the soul and its beauty (noble, well-formed - 209B8), 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” (210B7).

She even calls the body a polluter. (211E2). This ranking, not of domains, but 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.

The trajectory of the one who is initiated into the rites of love:

First: love one body and beget beautiful ideas there (210A8)

Next: several, then all beautiful bodies.

Then: beauty in souls more precious than beauty in body (210B6). Gives birth to beautiful ideas that will make young men better.

Then: Beauty of/in activities and laws. Beauty of body loses weight.

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 moves up the ladder:

The first move is an expansion, but also internal transformation of love from step to step: 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” (210B5) 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 of intensity and dependence, gain of tranquility and independence? (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” (211C4).

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? 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. That means that you ought not to leap ahead to the higher ones before you have experienced the earlier ones. The path matters!

Two possibilities for the significance of the ‘lower’ forms, also two readings of Diotima’s speech.

A religious reading sees the ascent towards final goal as purification, as leaving behind the lower forms. An ascesis of sorts.

Its message: Leave behind what was loved, and the kind of love of the lower stage. The lower stage 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” (211C1-211D1). 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” (211E1).

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, or the dependence on just one 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. Don’t let yourself be taken over by passion, or lust, but allow ‘the right kind of love for the body.” (What would that be?) What is to be acquired is merely 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 . . . (210D1-6). 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.

Evaluation of the two attitudes and readings:

Can we decide between the two? Does Plato favor one? Should we favor one? I favor the mundane model, at least in mundane practice, whereas the religious, transcendent model is the one Diotima may dreams of, but at the same time deems unrealizable. 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.

Criteria for love and beauty

To give birth in beauty – to desire immortality

The initiation (by self or other – comp 211C1)) that leads love/lead by love towards acquaintance with the idea of beauty presupposes that all the stages and phases are - love. What lets all of them be cases of love? The metaphysical answer: They all participate in the idea of beauty. Unsatisfactory answer, 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 (206B9); (b) to love is to desire immortality (207A4). 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” (205B5-7). 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, turns to the “real purpose of love:”

(a) “It is giving birth in beauty, whether in body or soul” (206B9-10). Obviously to do something ‘in beauty’ is opposed to ‘love wants/desires beauty’ or ‘love is wanting to possess . . .’ (206A12). What does Diotima mean by the formula? Can love for the body give birth in beauty? Is love for the body 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? To perform ‘in beauty’ must be compatible with messiness!

To give birth, birthing: to bring something into the world that has not existed before, something that will assume 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 (in pain!), 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 the birthing kind. But at least it is of the nurturing 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. Love, the mediator between the atemporal and the temporal, is beauty’s way to come into the mundane realm. It 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” (202D14). 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 acquaint him-/herself 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 getting a glimpse of pure beauty. This is why the messenger can be said to “round out the whole and bind fast the all to all” (202E7). 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.

(b) to give birth in beauty. What does “in beauty” here mean? Footnote 79 on p. 53 of our text 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 practitioner of friendship inserts him-/herself into 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 (219B3-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” (210A2 and 210A6)? Those criteria 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. Elements that come up here and there: 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 202E7: “rounds out and binds all to all.” Freud’s ‘Eros’); an element of mutuality and reciprocity (see Alcibiades at 222B3, 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 make him accept the status of disciple.

(b) Immortality

Diotima puts forward a second purpose for love. “Love must desire immortality.” (207A4). 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 this does not seem to be her point in 207D2-207E4. In her perspective the reproductive aspect of bodily love 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 in 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. She binds 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 in a context that devalues 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.

(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? (210A8). 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 just 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?