Chapter 1

The Platonic Concept of the Beautiful

The Historical Vicissitudes of the Concept

The scene is set for a group of friends to meet. Older and younger men gather at leisure to discuss matters of the spirit, generally under the guidance of a teacher who is wise and charismatic. The men believe in a higher world and they believe in the highest world. However, if men explore spiritual things together, the bond of love will tie them to each other in the form of both Erôs and Philia. Nothing is more erotic than philosophical speech. This eroticization is magnified whenever Erôs is mentioned, even if in disgust or shame. What matters is that it is mentioned. This is a group of exalted men; this is a situation of ekstasis. All eyes are on the charismatic teacher, and everyone is also looking at each other. This is a group of men among whom felicity could dwell. Plato stated many times that gods are never jealous. Why was this statement so important and worthy of repetition? It was important because men are jealous, and in small esoteric circles there is perhaps more jealousy than in the public sphere.

Part 1

Erôs, Thánatos, Madness, and the Ascent: Plato’s Warm Metaphysics of Beauty

Young Plato fell in love with Socrates, but Socrates was ugly. One cannot fall in love with the ugly; one loves only the beautiful. Plato could not say that he fell in love with the wise one who happened to be ugly. Thus, he proclaimed that his beloved was beautiful, superior in beauty to anyone else considered beautiful by the ignorant. One says, “This is not beautiful, but something else is beautiful,” and Plato proclaimed similarly, “This is a lower kind of beauty, but there is also a higher kind.” However, this higher, true and real beauty is invisible to the pedestrian’s eye. Plato, who loved Socrates, is the one who loved the true Beauty, the higher species of the beautiful. His love is more subtle and sublime than the love of any others, for he can see and love the supreme beauty of the invisible spirit and soul; he can see this love with his spiritual eyes. It is young Plato who speaks through the character of Alcibiades in the Symposium: “What [Socrates] reminds me of more than anything is one of those little sileni that you see on the statuaries’ stalls . . . they’re modeled with pipes or flutes in their hands, and when you open them down the middle there are little figures of the gods inside.”1 But this is just a simile, for the divine picture, the soul of Socrates, is not accessible through the opening of the sileni’s body. Not everyone can open it; only love can perform the miracle. There are two miracles that appear at once: the miracle of beauty hidden behind an ugly mask, and the miracle of love that sees through the mask into the essence of another person’s soul. This is the primal scene of the concept of the beautiful: erôs and kalon, love and the beloved. We love the beautiful—and it is beautiful because we love it.

We see real beauty in the sileni whose body must be opened; we see the picture of the deity within. The uncanny holds the candle for the primal scene. The philosophic-mythological interpretation of the birth of Love and Beauty as recited by Diotima through Socrates’s speech in the Symposium is the ironic confirmation of Alcibiades’s speech. Before Alcibiades enters the scene, Socrates conveys the message that he (Socrates) is well understood. Although Alcibiades’s speech is last in the dialogue, the experiences he advertises about Socrates precede the banquet, for they took place outside the frame of the symposium and were also captured philosophically through Diotima’s story.

Diotima discloses that we desire what we do not have.2 Love is not the beautiful because it is desire. What we desire, the object of our love, is truly what is beautiful. Diotima negates: she calls into question the usual, commonplace, and poetic concepts of the beautiful. She utters the magical sentence in order to conjure up the concept of the beautiful: she states, “This is not beautiful; something else is.” The truly beautiful is constituted by love, but love is first desire. We desire the beautiful because desire is unquenchable. Love is the child of Poros and Penia, of abundance and scarcity.3 The story of Poros and Penia is an ambiguous metaphor. Its interpretation varies from age to age, from philosopher to philosopher. To keep in mind the concept of the beautiful and concentrate on disclosing some secret of its birth, I here offer three alternative yet not necessarily exclusive interpretations.

One can decipher the mythological metaphor in the following way. The lover is in a state of scarcity because he is in a state of unquenchable desire; whereas the beloved represents plenitude, abundance, fulfillment—the absolute everything—to the lover. This reverses the gender roles of the story, for the one who seeks the other (namely Poros) is rich and the one who is sought (Penia), who embodies the promise of fulfillment, is poor. Yet the fulfillment of desire stands for abundance without scarcity—Poros without Penia. The Mother of Erôs is lost and the loss of the Mother means death.4

We can interpret the metaphor also in the sense of being in love. This is not a state, but rather a constant pendulum movement between abundance and scarcity. The lover’s love vacillates between cold and hot, between need and satisfaction of need. Love (the love of beauty) is constantly vacillating between life and death. While the possibility of both of these interpretations arises in the Symposium, as well as in other of Plato’s works, Plato rejects them.

And then there is also the ironic self-interpretation. Erôs is a daimon. When Diotima describes Erôs, the daimon (through Socrates’s mouth), she ends up with a stylized self-portrait of Socrates himself. We learn that Erôs is always poor. He is neither tender nor beautiful, and walks barefoot.5 He is homeless, but always searches for the Good and the Beautiful. Likewise, he is a great hunter. He loves to ensnare and lay traps. Because he knows that he is not wise (like Socrates), he is a lover of wisdom. He is also said to be a great sorcerer, a sophist.6 The ironic portrait is a stylized self-portrait because it is Socrates who is telling us what Diotima has allegedly told him. He speaks about himself while pretending not to notice that he is doing so. Thus while pretending, he actually does all of the things that Erôs does according to the speech of Diotima. Socrates deceives his listeners. Such forms of deception belong to Socrates’s daimonic nature. He is, after all, a sileni, a pied piper, an ironist. If we consider what is going on in this philosophic play, we will admit that everyone who places himself in the middle of a fiction discloses a daimonic nature of a similar kind. He will talk about himself through the mouthpiece of someone else, as Diotima speaks for Socrates in Socrates’s speech, as if a deity talked through him. Surely those tricks are also well known from the games played between a lover and a beloved. But is it true that Socrates draws a self-portrait, for it is Plato and not Socrates who writes the dialogue. Isn’t Plato tricking Socrates by letting Socrates play the trick? It seems again that the portrait designed by Diotima via Socrates is in fact not a self-portrait, but a portrait—the portrait that Plato is drawing (with desire and love) of the man whom he loved. If we look closely at this portrait, it will remind us uncannily of the picture of Socrates as it emerged from Alcibiades’s narrative. Diotima speaks; the older Plato speaks. He speaks about a man with whom the young Plato was enamored and whose portrait he always sublimated (with the exception of the Symposium and the Phaedrus, perhaps because these two dialogues are the most autobiographical). Young Phaedrus is also young Plato, as much as is young Alcibiades. Erôs is the daimon; Socrates is one mask of the daimon. As Erôs, he is desire; he is the lover. But Alcibiades as Plato loved Socrates because of his beauty, a beauty that appeared behind the exterior of ugliness. It seems as if Socrates were both a lover and a beloved. While Plato made us believe so, at least in Alcibiades’s speech one cannot be both simultaneously. One must be one of them seemingly, the other truly. One is on the surface, the other exists essentially. But one cannot be seemingly and essentially at the same time. Socrates was seemingly the lover, but essentially the beloved. Whoever is seemingly a lover and essentially the beloved is the seducer. Socrates was, both in his alleged self-portrait and in the portrait presented by Alcibiades, the daimon insofar as he was the seducer. Nietzsche calls Socrates the Rattenfänger (the pied piper), the satyr of the German fairy tale who charms the children of Hammerl with his daimonic music and lures them into the sea to drown them.7 In Plato the seducer seduces us into abandoning the earthly Aphrodite for the sake of the heavenly One. He lures us not into the bottomless sea, but into the sublimation of Erôs—into the ascension. After all, where does the sublimation of Erôs end? In catching sight of the Absolute before the afterlife, in leaving behind the body and becoming only soul, beholding the absolute absolutely—are we then not drowned just as the children of Hammerl? Do we not lose all beauties in beholding just One?

The primal scene of the concept of the beautiful is also the primal scene of passionate love.8 Only those who love just one individual are carried away by amatory madness.9 One loves the beautiful. When being seduced by the daimonic Erôs, one passionately loves the One—the most beautiful one, the only being worthy of absolute love. Not all kinds of earthly love inspire the desire to ascend into immortality through death—only the most concentrated, the most intensive kind. The most intensive love is the love toward one who is good, for the love of the good one is also the love of the Good.10 One better begin the trip of ascension with the love of one single, virtuous and good person to arrive safely at the end of the journey to the love of the One.

Alcibiades is the eternal beginner. He arrives at amour passion, for he loves just one man. He sees the beautiful sanctuary behind the ugly facade of his beloved. Yet he does not ascend. This is why it is from his narrative that the drive for ascension can be best understood. Amour passion starts with the opening of the satyr’s statue in which one becomes enchanted with the “within.” Amour passion is awakened by the daimon, namely Socrates; and it turns out that this passion is far more daimonic, more uncanny, even more dangerous and unpredictable than the love of the body. The first step toward sublimation seems to worsen the malaise. It seems to increase the tension. There is witness here of the re-emergence of barbarism from the spirit of the polis. This is the same story that the dramatic poets of Athens were telling us. One should not forget that the whole event of the Symposium takes place in the house of Agathon, the dramatic poet, and that the party is thrown to celebrate the victory won by the host in the tragedy contest during the same day.

Alcibiades embodies the ambiguity of the strenuous process of the outcome from barbarism through sublimation. For Alcibiades is the man of sublimated barbarism. The story about the outcome from barbarism is the story of murder—matricide and patricide—of suffering, envy, jealousy, betrayal (think here of Oedipus, Clytemnestra, and Medea) and reconciliation (think of Oresteia). Alcibiades is an abbreviation of this story. Barbarism is enclosed in Alcibiades’s wishes and dreams, but not manifest in his deeds. In the world of wishes and dreams there is no respite or reconciliation.

Amour passion opens an avenue for and is a result of the outcome of barbarism. Here we arrive at a crossroads of uncontrolled drives that use all the outlets available and the virtues of self-control and spiritual sublimation. The crossroads at which one arrives from the underworldly realm is not yet the firm ground from which one can embark on the ascent.

Here the scene is set for the lover and the beloved. The beloved is the daimon, the seducer. The handsome body does not seduce; rather the power of the spirit does. Plato delineates the Apollonian and the Dionysian daimons.11 He detests the Dionysian in fright; it is the enemy. But he also discovers and describes the powerful presence of the Dionysian daimon in the human soul. This is particularly the case in Book IX of The Republic where—as will be shown—Plato associates the rule of sexual instincts with the absolute tyrannical rule.12

Alcibiades arrives at a crossroads. His love becomes amour passion because the satisfaction of his sexual desire has been thwarted by the very person whom he loves. Erôs—as the desire for the seducer or as the seducer’s desire—is not a sheer sexual drive. Whether one identifies Erôs at least approximatively with Socrates the seducer, or whether one calls Erôs the “great god” as Socrates does in his second so-called “right hand” speech in Phaedrus, the essence of Erôs is not lovemaking but the desire to make love to one chosen person whom one desires. This is why amour passion (Erôs) possesses Alcibiades; he is possessed because he is enamored with Socrates and Socrates alone. Erôs possession causes him immense suffering and triggers his fits of both inward and outward aggression. Alcibiades says, for example: “But this latter day Maryas, here, has often left me in such a state of mind that I’ve felt I simply couldn’t go on living the way I did.”13 he says that Socrates was the only person who made him feel shame. (This is a typical sign of the outcome of barbarism.) He continues with the death wish: “There are times when I’d honestly be glad to hear that he was dead.”14 Rage is mixed with total submission: “or the moment I hear him speak I am smitten with a kind of sacred rage . . . and my heart jumps into my mouth and the tears start in my eyes.”15 These are some, but not all, of the symptoms of amatory madness.16

Erôs and amour passion are born at the crossroads where barbarism ends and the ground for the spiritual takeoff begins. This is the starting place for the ascension. If one arrives at the crossroads, one is not good; the outcome of barbarism itself does not make men good. Rather, the dark powers of the underworld no longer operate on their own. They are accompanied by allied daimonic forces.

Sophistic argumentation and rhetoric are, in Plato’s theater, such evil daimonic forces. So are different kinds of love and desire. Diotima does not only mention the love of beauty, but also speaks of the love of money. Indeed, if one desires money, one has to withhold immediate satisfaction of the direct barbaric instincts just as much as if one loves one person, loves to create (in the form of poeisis), or become the lover of wisdom.

Plato makes Alcibiades (his younger self?) speak in such a way that elucidates his dilemma. Plato asks, Does civilization improve morals? Or perhaps morals and civilization are not connected at all. After all, the sophists are just like the money-seekers; they are men of civilization, learning, and sophistication. They are knowledgeable and do not behave like animals. But no “improvement” of morals has been achieved. It was only that the old ethical ties were destroyed as a result of the teachings and oratory speeches. One has to go through the trial of possibly mental and physical sufferings. One has to endure the labor of giving birth with the help of a daimon who understands how to channel feelings, passions, and drives towards something that helps to leave behind the crossroads and thereby barbarism once and for all.

Why is Socrates, the Socrates of Alcibiades and the young Plato, a seducer? He makes Alcibiades do something that none of his fellow youths were doing; Socrates makes them suffer from something that average young men of Athens were not suffering: that is to “leave father and mother” and follow the sound of the pipe. But Alcibiades will never be lured into the sea to be happily drowned. He follows the seducer and hears the sound of the pipe, but he will never reach the shore of the sea. He remains the victim of Erôs, the man of humiliated pride (the pride that will never end in order that he might protest against his fate).

How does Socrates seduce? We could say that he first seduces with the general tricks of seduction and promises something that he does not deliver. He lays down naked beside the body of the lover without making love to him. He fails to reciprocate the love he constantly rekindles. Socrates is cruel; seduction is cruel. The question is, why the cruelty, and for what is the victim of the cruelty being seduced?

Plato speaks, and not Alcibiades, who suffers loudly and makes scandals, protests, and curses. We may characterize his cruelty as pharmakon, the poison that is also the remedy. Plato, through Socrates and Diotima, intimates that he is seduced for the ascension, for gaining the force to fly toward the idea of the Good and the Beautiful. If he would only let himself be entirely seduced without protest, the poison would take better effect and the remedy might cure him. If someone fails to ascend, he will fall back onto the crossroads.

The seducer does not keep his promise or rather he promises something that he does not keep. Otherwise, he would not be a seducer. But in the case of Socrates this is so only for those victims of his seduction who have not fully comprehended his promise. Socrates shows his precious, beautiful, inner self. He reveals his self and young men love him because of it. But who is then inconsistent, Socrates or Alcibiades? Socrates has a beautiful soul, but he says that he loves the beautiful bodies of the young men. The young men misunderstand this because they presuppose that one loves the beautiful only if one satisfies oneself with it. However, in the case of Socrates this is not so. Socrates, the daimon of the beautiful soul, can seduce only insofar as he does not possess those beautiful bodies he has seduced. Erôs is here used as libido. One cannot begin the ascension without sufficient energy. Alcibiades misunderstands Socrates’s desire. Alcibiades believes in asymmetrical reciprocity and declares: I do love the beautiful soul of Socrates, he loves my beautiful body, and so we shall be one.

But this is not to be because of the character of the Beautiful as presented by Plato. Among men there is no reciprocity other than symmetrical reciprocity in matters of beauty. Beauty is an equalizer. Whoever loves the beautiful soul must have a beautiful soul also. The mistakes result from blurring the distinction between external and internal, and between symmetrical and asymmetrical reciprocity. If you blur the distinctions, then Erôs becomes the driving energy of your ascension. Passionate love (in Plato, and perhaps also for Socrates) is the offspring of a fatal misunderstanding. Alcibiades suffers and becomes aggressive because he misunderstands the other, because he feels betrayed; and so he is. Plato knows what is at stake, for misunderstanding is structurally inherent within passionate love.17

No similar kind—or any kind—of misunderstanding can be detected in the speeches that precede the speech of Socrates. The most important among them, from our point of view, is the speech of Aristophanes. It is the interpretation of Diotima’s story about Poros and Penia. According to this interpretation, there is a constant and repeated (moreover, repeatable) pendulum movement between desire and satisfaction. This is the main message of Aristophanes’s myth.

The topology of the myth is the important issue here. One could get the impression that we are confronted with a pagan version of the Judeo-Christian story of the fall. It seems as if the originary, whole, human person had dwelled higher than the present—disgraced—version of the human race. The original human beings, the archetypes of men and women, were cut into two halves because the gods were frightened by their immense might and power. The story does not indicate that they have “sinned,” only that they were too powerful in the opinion of the gods, who were afraid of competition. After the “operation,” the gods of the Olympia could feel safe. The question of whether the human creatures are fit to live was the well-known complication subsequent to the operation. In this case, each remained in an eternal embrace with its other half. But eternal embrace is death. We are told that Zeus had a great idea: he invented a simple mechanical device, namely the genitals, and glued them on, or carved them into, the bodies. Because of this ingenuousness, humans were finally ready to live. The sexual organs enabled Erôs to be satisfied. From that point on, men and women can live, for they have acquired the gift of satisfaction. Human life then begins with a repetition cycle: desire-satisfaction-desire-satisfaction, and so on. Just as the cycles of day and night, and winter and summer follow each other in due course, so do desire and satisfaction. Winter is death; so is satisfaction—but spring follows winter, and desire follows satisfaction.

In this model—and as far as the Symposium is concerned, in this model alone—beauty does not participate in the work of Erôs. The world of desire and satisfaction remains without beauty. If desire is satisfied, there is no need for sublimation, nor is there energy remaining to propel the ascension. Nevertheless, the myth of Aristophanes is laden with metaphysical meaning. There is anamnesis here. The soul does not remember as it did in Plato’s grand scheme, but the body does. It remembers something it beheld before birth, namely its other half. The remedy of desire is simplified because of Zeus’s ingenuity: copulation. This is necessary in Diotima’s eyes, hence in Plato’s. Yet, it is also a kind of waste.

In the story of Aristophanes one does not beget or give birth in beauty. The repetitive rhythm of satisfaction/desire does not require beauty. The entirely different spatial motion of the ascension, however, needs beauty as the energy resource for the takeoff—to begin ascension. But the motive of anamnesis is shared. The soul remembers what it has seen before birth, although vaguely. And the energy of Erôs—just like desire in Aristophanes’ tale—brings the other half back to its source, to the idea.

Before she begins to recite the stations of ascension, Diotima—through Socrates’s speech—says two important things. The first I have already mentioned. One gives birth and begets in beauty. That means that the theme of the myth of Aristophanes reemerges. In one’s spirit and soul one is already a whole, like the archetype of man, both males and females. So one may get close to the gods after all.

The second, equally important message of Diotima’s saying is that the love of beauty is, in the last instance, tantamount to our desire for immortality. Diotima’s trump card is to link desire to immortality as to its end and justification. She played it out against Aristophanes, but also against all of the other speakers of the Symposium.18 The rhythm described by Aristophanes conjures up the cycle of death and resurrection. One dies in the embrace, but death itself warrants resurrection. After having died, one can continue to live their life, to argue, work, dream, and take care of political business. Then desire strikes again, and again one dies. This death is symbolical, for it is the precondition of life and life’s continuity; there is no eternal rhythm. Diotima eliminates the rhythm in the myth of ascension, for ascension is the climbing of a ladder that leads from mortality to immortality. What is believed to be death, namely absolute possession, the eternal embrace of what one loves—in Diotima’s story, the Good—is identical to immortal life. If one follows it without fail and without hesitation, desire does not lead to a satisfaction from which life can be renewed, but to a unification or satisfaction that endures, which blossoms and lives forever.

Diotima’s logic is straightforward: Life is but constant suffering from desire, whereas death (the unification with the supreme Good) is the eternal life. The favorite Plato passage of the Christian authors (and the one most hated by Nietzsche), the metaphor of the cock sacrificed to Aesclepius from Phaedo, is hidden behind the lines of the Symposium. In Phaedo the dying Socrates declares before his friends that he will be cured by death from his sickness (for life is sickness—sickness unto death).19 Alcibiades, on the other hand, suffers because he has not been cured of his sickness, although he was already touched by the wings of the highest beauty. Phaedrus, in the dialogue that bears his name, was the lucky one because he was introduced to the mysteries by Socrates. As the privileged and sole listener of the right-hand speech, the speech delivered by Socrates unveiled, he could not become the victim of misunderstanding. He was not seduced.20 Moreover, in disclosing the secrets of the growing wings for ascension, Socrates did not entirely exclude the exceptional possibility of earthly satisfaction. The common element between the Phaedrus dialogue and Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium (both obviously autobiographical motives of Plato) is the emphasis on withholding satisfaction and essentializing desire. The focus is on falling in love with one man and with one alone, with Socrates, the impossible.

There are two stories of ascension in Plato. One is told in the Symposium, the other in the Phaedrus. Both are told by Socrates, once in the capacity of the messenger of the divine oracle, another as the panegyrician of the god of love.

In Phaedrus, the metaphor of the two horses (the disobedient and the obedient) ties the two stories together. It also contains an allusion to Aristophanes’ speech. One speaks about the fall (this time a fall from heaven to earth) from the world of the gods, souls, and ideas down into the jailhouse of the body, from the eternal circling of the chariots and charioteers down into the compulsive rhythm of desire/satisfaction as dictated by the disobedient and stubborn horse. The takeoff of the ascension in which the wings are grown fuels the energy here as much as in the Symposium from the thwarted, unsatisfied desire. But the story also alludes to Plato’s other concept of the beautiful, which is associated with form and harmony. After all, one can synchronize the galloping of the two horses under the guidance of the charioteer (which is reason), so that they remain different. Harmony of this kind is the unity of difference, a unity that does not destroy difference, but instead attunes the diverging elements to each other. The beautiful soul is marked by peace instead of conflict.

In the conception of Phaedrus, the anamnesis motive is stronger:

[W]hen he that loves beauty is touched by such madness he is called a lover. Such a one, as soon as he beholds the beauty of this world, is reminded of true beauty, and his wings begin to grow; then, is he fain to lift his wings and fly upward; yet he has not the power, but inasmuch as he gazes upward like a bird, and cares nothing for the world beneath, men charge it upon him that he is demented.21

The lost happiness is what one desires to regain, or to gain in the first place, in sleeping with another like-minded or like-spirited man. Then even the occasional and contingent satisfaction of desire will not enter into the desire/satisfaction cycle. It is not seen as the advent of an empty and repetitious cyclical motion, but as an exception. It is the very exception of earthly felicity, which gives the aftertaste of heavenly felicity that one has lost; and it is the foretaste of a heavenly felicity that one might yet gain. Needless to say, the other Platonic concept of the beautiful, that of harmony composed of different voices, also has something to do with this promise of happiness.

The simplest, shortest, and most exemplary story of the ascension is captured by Diotima in Symposium. At the end of the ascension, in the final phase that is, the individual undergoing the process realizes that there is only one science that has enabled him or her to arrive at the point sought after. It is here on the stage of the One that the individual finally arrives and understands: the One is revelation. At the first stage of the ascent Diotima outlines there is one: one lover, one beloved, amour passion, the promise of happiness, the aftertaste and the foretaste. At the last stage, the One is revelation. the promise of happiness, Erôs, the promise of one (beloved), throws the ball upward that it should arrive at the mirror image of the first one, and to its opposite—the One, the final. It is departure and arrival.

But is this arrival final? It is and it is not. It was said that true philosophy appears at the end, in the form of one true science, at the top of the ladder. But it may also be said that this is not so. For one arrives just to the middle of the ladder. However, this middle is not the middle, for from then on one does not climb but rather one flies. After that, one has glanced at the light of the idea: philosophy, the fourth kind of madness. There is no longer any strenuous work, only everlasting delight.

After having learned that the beauty of the most magnificent kind is everlasting, one learns that the everlasting is also an absence of rhythm. Plato sensitizes this through negations. It is important that the determinations enter through negations because it is here—at the middle of the ladder—that all everyday concepts of the beautiful are left behind. All of the other kinds of beauties that the individual had to acquire in the ascension were present in the traditional Greek imagination. Deeds were also called beautiful, as well as some constitutions, and certainly as well as virtuous and perfect souls. Plato’s innovation was to present them as separate stages in the ascension; they changed meaning, but they could still be recognized. But now comes something entirely new. This is why negation, the birthright of the concept of the beautiful, appears here on the stage.

So we learn that the magnificent beauty does not come into being. It does not perish, it does not increase or decrease. It is not beautiful in this and ugly in that. It is unlike any part of the body and it is within anything else. These are everything that “real beaut” is not. Then comes the affirmation: “and this is how real Beauty is.” It is in itself and eternal. Every other beauty is only a part of this Beauty. The coming into being and perishing of the partial beauties does not touch it, does not increase or decrease it. If one begins to see this beauty, one begins to approximate the end.

During the first stage of the climbing one does not see the goal, but continues climbing while leaving the lesser beauties behind for the sake of the more sublime ones. After having cast a glance at the goal, one already knows what to approximate. First, one comes blindly, then one uses one’s sight.

Without total sublimation, that is, without thinking beautiful thoughts, one will never behold the vision of pure Beauty. But the turning point and thus the birthplace of the concept of the beautiful is at the middle of the metaphorical ladder. It is there where philosophy emerges and points out the idea, the One/Beauty itself that one will approximate in the second stage of ascension. Diotima, like a schoolmistress, repeats the lesson about the road to real beauty and its stages.

And this is the way, the only way, he must approach, or be led toward, the sanctuary of Love. Starting from individual beauties, the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institution to learning, and from learning in general to the special love that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is.22

But the repetition is not just a repetition, because the conclusion is new. “And if, my dear Socrates,” Diotima went on, “man’s life is ever worth the living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty.”23

This conclusion advances the answer to the next story, to Alcibiades’s narrative. Alcibiades does not know whether it is worthwhile to live on. Diotima (Socrates) knows the answer: to approximate the highest beauty—this, and only this, is worth living for.

The long ascension is followed by a short reference to descent. It is one of the many variants of the cave simile from The Republic. A man who beheld the Idea of the beautiful knows real beauty and not just the illusions of it; he can beget beautiful deeds and practice real (not just seeming) virtues. Here the speech ends abruptly with the following remark—this time in Socrates’s own name and not in Diotima’s: “every man among us should worship the god of love, and this is why I cultivate and worship all the elements of Love myself, and bid others to do the same.”24 The irony of this statement is that Socrates means what he says. For his concept of Erôs is as idiosyncratic (mostly the reversal of the common concept) as is his concept of the Beautiful. The art of love is the avenue to immortality. The reciprocity of love is at least seemingly presupposed.

But why did I mention Thánatos in the title of the Platonic concept? After all, Socrates is a person very much alive who immerses himself in the speculation about something that one cannot see with mundane eyes. The promise of immortality is seemingly just the opposite of the gravity of Thánatos. Still the pull of Thánatos is omnipresent.

Socrates arrives late to the celebration. He remains standing in a catatonic state for a while before the door; he neither hears nor speaks. His is another place. He is alone, not with his friends and fellows. He dwells in another world. For only together with one’s fellows is one in this world. The quasi-catatonic state of Socrates is the state of death. And his seductive power originates from there, namely from his being-in-another-world. Who is the Seducer? Someone who is alone, but does not want to remain alone. He seduces the young men to climb the ladder, to begin to approximate. He seduces in using (misusing, misplacing) his erotic energy on them by making the men fall in love with him without the slightest hope of reciprocation or satisfaction. Socrates leads the others to the ladder so that he will not remain alone to climb it. His education is but an invitation to enter the second world, an invitation into the world of philosophy where one can speculate with others about love and beauty and about absolutely everything. Is there a promise of happiness more forceful than this? And conversely, is this not just another form (a sublimated form) of copulation? After all, one cannot conduct philosophical conversation ad infinitum. One has to find satisfaction; one has to liberate oneself from the spiritual embrace in order to do other things, to live a “normal” life. And if one does so, one does so with ever less interest because satisfaction pulls, and one accumulates in an accelerated pace the desire to return to the feast in the anticipation of felicity. The cycle of death and life is there. Every satisfaction is followed by a new desire.

The primal scene of the concept of the beautiful is the triad of erôs, thánatos, and ascent. The primal scene of the concept is the scene of sublimation and of happiness. It is not just the contemplation of the Idea of Beauty that makes us happy, but the constant approximation of it. It is an approximation that borrows energy from erôs, from the same source as the ascension in general, the practicing of philosophy that we approximate for the sake of happiness. This is Plato’s “warm” concept of beauty. But he has also developed a “cold” concept.

Part 2

Fear of Flying: Light, Sphere, and Harmony—Plato’s Cold Metaphysics of Beauty

Cold beauty is beauty without Erôs. There is sublimity here, but not sublimation. There is neither desire nor felicity of total satisfaction. Instead of self-abandonment, there is contemplation. Instead of the promise of happiness, there is the promise of truth and justice. Those who have glanced at the light do not return to the beautiful body of the beloved to teach him to grow wings and fly. They rather return into the city where they devise laws and rules. Plato succumbs to the Freudian fear of flying. This is not just the fear of Erôs, but also the fear of chaos in general. Two millennia later, Shakespeare makes Othello say that if Desdemona—the one and only beloved—proves to be faithless, chaos returns. In Plato’s nightmares chaos is always about to return. The mission of philosophy as metaphysics is to contain chaos. The world of total order becomes the counterpoint of the world of chaos. Order is self-sufficient. It does not make one suffer. It cannot be destroyed from within, and certainly not from without. Order is the limit (peras) that gives proper measure to the unlimited (apeiron). Limit orders time and fluidity into forms and rhythms. Beauty is order; therefore, beauty is self-sufficiency, the proper ratio (proportion), symmetry, harmony, form, and also light. The most beautiful light is the invisible light. The most beautiful harmony is the inaudible one. To attain pure beauty all the senses need to be completely superseded. Only that which can be thought should also be seen as beautiful, for example, geometrical figures or numbers. Thought and that which can be thought, and nothing else, is beautiful.

A great sacrifice is to be made on the altar of beauty. The transient things need to be sacrificed: not only Dionysius, but at least to a degree also Apollo. Not just the barbaric impulses, but also dreams and imagination need to be sacrificed. Plato is wise and radical. He knows that Apollo lives from the impulses received by Dionysius, and that even Apollo’s beauty can be put into the service of Dionysius. Plato was absolutely modern and concluded that we should not be.

The tripartite division of the soul is Plato’s model both in Phaedrus and in The Republic. But in Phaedrus the disobedient horse can still be appeased, although it needs to be held in check since it is because of this horse’s stubbornness that men lose their wings and fall into bodies. One can also let desire have what it wants and still grow wings. Moreover, the disobedient horse, the cause of the fall, is also one of the potentials of the ascension. For it is the disobedient horse and not the obedient one that provides the energy for the ascension.

In The Republic, the dynamic of the tripartite pattern of the soul changes. Desire, the lowest section of the soul, is still necessary because it participates in the equilibrium, hence the justice, of the whole. Desire must be kept under control; this is self-evident. Yet it cannot provide energy for the others. It only performs its own function, as do the other two parts, and it should not interfere with the others’ work.

The ascension in Republic is not inspired by Erôs. The single person who ascends does not grow wings here; he does not fly. He needs to be introduced to philosophic thinking, particularly into dialectics, with proper care. Prior to this, men and women must also become educated in certain sciences. The preparation is aiskesis and not ekstasis. We know that a young person (such as Phaedrus or Alcibiades) cannot ascend to philosophy in The Republic since a person must be fifty years old in order to reach the pinnacle of the philosopher-kings. The young individuals can fly only on the wings of Erôs. In the cold version of ascension, however, there is no active Erôs. Erôs impedes ascension. Ascension is no longer constituted by flying.

The fear of flying is the fear of chaos, the fear of relapse into barbarism. From the discussion in Symposium (and not Phaedrus) one learns that amour passion already signals the outcome of barbarism, but it is a kind of outcome that remains ambiguous. It is exactly in and through this ambiguity that the erotic energy can be used for the ascent. But Plato is also afraid of this double bind. He wants a state, and a state of mind, without ambiguity—the total rule over barbarism, the entire and final repression of the fellow barbarian within all of us. In Book IX of The Republic Socrates describes the tyrannical soul. He speaks about desires. He admits that there are desires in every person’s soul. There are necessary and unnecessary desires. Among the latter there are a few that always run against the law. Listen to the entirely Freudian rendering of the id/ego/superego relationship. Socrates says that he thinks of desires as

[w]hat are awakened in sleep when the rest of the soul, the rational, gentle and dormant part, slumbers but the beastly and savage part . . . repelling sleep, endeavors to sally forth and satisfy its own instincts. You are aware that in such cases there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of shame and all reason. It does not shrink from attempting to lie with a mother in fancy or with anyone else, man, god, or brute. It is ready for any foul deed of blood.

And then he adds, “the point that we have to notice is this, that in fact there exists in every one of us, even in some reputedly most respectable, a terrible, fierce, and lawless brood of desires, which it seems are revealed in our sleep.”25 Apollo, the god of dreams, stands here in the service of Dionysus. It is, maybe, not a too farfetched thought to think that Plato’s suspicion of Homer, some of the dramatic poets, and certain forms of music has something to do with his discovery of the Apollo/Dionysus fraternity. Imagination is dangerous, for imagination can set the barbarian in us loose. And the little barbarian lives in all of us, even in the most virtuous individuals. Plato considers murderous and incestuous instincts to be human universals. He believed that imagination is a kind of dream that loosens the censorship. The philosopher-censor of The Republic is a fellow brother of the Freudian censor. But Plato’s anthropology is more pessimistic than the Freudian. He does not trust the internal censor fully. Only the external censor mobilized by the state can properly do the work. Imagination needs to be exiled from the state and the state of mind. But, unfortunately one cannot exile the dreams from the sleep of humans. There is a limit to censorship. True, strenuous exercises in the gymnasium, practice in virtuous music, and so on, can cut off the wings of the imagination.

Fear of flying is the fear of imagination uncontrolled by reason, because whoever flies on the wings of imagination becomes freed from the censor as in the dream. Plato’s well-known theory of mimesis is one of the metaphysical and ontological underpinnings of his crusade against free-floating, uncensored imagination. For reason is, after all, the censor of both desire and imagination.

In the spirit of the “cold” concept, Beauty is identified with self-sufficiency. The kinds of pleasure that have something to do with replenishment beget new needs; they must be ugly or have no name. Kalon is good in itself; it is continuously pleasurable in itself. It does not need to open a new cycle that starts with deficiency. The etymology of kalon (associated with kalun in Cratylus) serves to corroborate this point: “Is not the mind that which called (kalesan) things by their names, and is not mind the beautiful (kalon)?”26 Things that are brought to light by thinking are praiseworthy because of their beauty, whereas those which are not deserve blame. This chain of thoughts simplifies one of the points in the Symposium. There one was informed that during the ascent one learns to produce beautiful thoughts, different kinds, in three consecutive steps. But Plato does not intimate there that everything else is blameworthy.27

The self-sufficiency of the supreme Beauty is one of the central thoughts in Plato’s unsystematic system. As long as one “flies,” one is not self-sufficient. If one feels the pain of desire, one desires something that has not, or is not. One needs the other, whether in the sense of Aristophanes or in the sense of Diotima/Socrates, or in the sense of Alcibiades or Phaedrus. Yet one still does.

The young men of The Republic are not self-sufficient either, for they need their tutors. But if one is already a philosopher who can (vaguely) behold the Light—the idea of Good and Beautiful—then one becomes self-sufficient. One does not need anyone; one descends into the world of the cave dwellers unwillingly only to help them in their need of enlightenment and not in order to be helped. This feature, which is nowhere spelled out more radically than in the Republic, is one of the most disquieting aspects of the metaphysical concepts of Beauty and of Goodness. Plato puts the premium on old men’s poor wisdom.

Self-sufficiency is cold, whether eternal or not. It can be dead, but it can also be very much alive. In Plato the whole universe, the kosmos, is also said to be self-sufficient. It is a living kosmos, but everything that it needs it provides for itself. The Platonic preference for the geometrical figures of the sphere and the circle, and also for the circular movement, is similarly linked to the idea of self-sufficiency. Perfection and simplicity are self-sufficient. The most beautiful is the most perfect. That is, the most beautiful is the most self-sufficient.28

As much as Plato’s warm concept of the beautiful is begotten in erôs, his cold concept arises in technê, in art.29 Plato developed ambiguous feelings toward the formal perfection of man-made things by using their structure as a model, but frequently rejected their contents or their ethos for being subservient to desire and imagination. Therefore, it is the kosmos and geometric figures that best fit the Platonic purpose. Created by the master demiurge, the kosmos is self-sufficient and perfect. It stands in no relation to anything. If one turn one’s gaze to the beauty of the kosmos no moral harm can be done. Instead of being motivated by anything, one stands here in the state of mere contemplation. And while one contemplates, the daimon of barbarism remains quiet, or is at least kept under control.

Consider here one of the descriptions of ascent from the Republic in order to return to the theme of the dream.30 There are three types of men: the lovers of spectacles; the lovers of sciences, arts, and action; and the lovers of wisdom. The word lover does not stand for erôs in this context, but for philia. The first type that enjoys beautiful colors and shapes, as well as beautiful sounds, does not have the faintest idea about the nature of the beautiful. After having said this, Socrates states, “He, then, who believes in beautiful things but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it—do you think that his life is a dream or awakening?”31 And then the conclusion is forthcoming: If one acknowledges the very existence of the Idea of Beauty and does not mistake things that only participate in Beauty for Beauty itself, he will not live his life in dreams. The everyday manner of seeing the beauty in different things and enjoying the beauty of things without concern for a common source of beauty is just doxa, mere opinion. If the censor fails a man during his sleep or if he remains stuck in the opinion of the multitude, he is dreaming. Uncontrolled imagination and opinion are the two subcategories of dreams. Both are together confronted with reason and thought.

One censor is not enough for Plato; he needs two of them. The laws are based on opinion, yet we know that certain dreams, the dream of incest, for example, are barbarian. But we also know this as an opinion. This is a true opinion, but opinions themselves are dreams. Dreams cannot be cured with other dreams. Opinions and dreams are usually both right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. There are never homogenous, never pure. They are poor remedies against the threat of barbarism. To the fear of flying is added the fear of walking on solid earth. Everything transient is the abode of wickedness.

This is a valuable insight, whether we accept transience or not, whether we like the remedy that Plato offers against it or not. For the question is posed: Why are people normally wicked? Plato gives us three reasons: first, because they have strong barbaric impulses; second, because their opinions of good and bad are confused and confused opinions open avenues for rationalizations of all kinds; third, because they know that they are mortals and that all beautiful things are transient. Only the belief in deserving immortality is a remedy strong enough to save us from falling back into chaos, both in the state and in our soul. For that which is immortal is entirely homogeneous, non-transient and self-sufficient. Hence there is the Platonic fear of flying, fear of walking, fear of mortality, and fear of transience.32

Purity, perfect form, perfect motion and self-sufficiency together characterize thus the demiurge-created kosmos. There is no unconditional parallel between the Platonic microcosm and macrocosm. The macrocosm was created to be perfect and self-sufficient. It is so and cannot be anything else, whereas the ensouled human is generally dissimilar to the macrocosm. Only the philosopher, or rather the dialectician, can arrive after the strenuous effort of climbing to the state of self-sufficiency. But even the self-sufficiency of the dialectician is only comparative because he draws his power from the heavenly Light. His beauty, which is the absolute justice of his soul, is fed by this otherworldly light and in all probability not only during his earthly journey. The kosmos, however, after creation does not depend on the demiurge. The kosmos is the absolute model of the beautiful order, and beauty, as we saw, is order.

The demiurge forms all of the elements of the kosmos into a sphere. In the Timaeus Plato writes:

for this cause . . . he made the world one whole, having every part entire, and being therefore perfect and not liable to old age and disease . . . . Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round from a lathe . . . the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures, for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike . . . . For the creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything. . . . But the movement suited to this spherical form was assigned to it . . . it was made to move . . . within its own limits revolving in a circle. . . . And in the center he put the soul . . . and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no friendship or acquaintance.33

In Phaedrus or Symposium happiness is beheld in the embrace of the other, the supreme Beauty. One needs desire to become happy even if the model of this felicity differs substantially from the banal forms of satisfaction. This is warm happiness. But the happiness of the kosmos (the macrocosmic model of the microcosm philosopher, which the latter can only approximate) is the coldest kind of happiness imaginable. It is a happiness of the total absence of desires and suffering, the happiness of absolute solitude, comprising neither erôs nor thánatos. There is no eternity in and through transience, but the opposite is the case: transience is entailed, as a “dream,” an unreal image of the real thing, within eternity. There is cold here, just as there is among Nietzsche’s mountains.

It is true that even the most perfect of microcosms, the dialectician, still approximates the Sun, the Light; he cannot entirely achieve self-sufficiency. The Sun and the Light are normally associated with warmth. The Sun is the source of warmth, but Plato’s Sun is cold. The supreme Light is not Beauty, but the Idea of the Good. One grasps the Idea of the Good with reason along. Not only are the senses excluded from participation in the highest bliss, but also the sentiments and feelings in general. There is thinking; there is contemplation. One contemplates the Idea of the Good without feeling anything.

Absolute coldness in a man who thinks is absolutely unthinkable. It is unthinkable for Plato, too. Not even the philosopher can become like the kosmos. It is the coldness that attracts the philosopher and that which he perhaps can behold vaguely. The Light and the Sun do promise a happiness of absolute self-sufficiency, the happiness of absolute solitude.

Part 3

A Neoplatonic Concept of the Beautiful Hypostases, Purity, and Sculpting: Plotinus’s Concept of the Beautiful

That the supreme beauty is of the intellectual kind and that real beauty is entirely homogeneous and pure are traditional Platonic thoughts. But Plotinus sharpens these thoughts and presents true beauty almost exclusively in terms of purity and homogeneity. Plotinus’s concept of the beautiful is carved from one stone, as is his concept of love. There are no ambiguities, shifts, reversals or misunderstandings.

Plotinus begins to discuss beauty with a critique of the stoic theory of symmetry. He proves that not all kinds of beauty are symmetrical, but that not all are asymmetrical. This gambit will be essential for his whole conception of the solitary Intellectual Principle, the first hypostasis, which is beauty itself, among other things. It is absolutely homogeneous and therefore cannot be symmetrical. But Plotinus goes further to demonstrate, although unconvincingly, that symmetry is not even one of the criteria of the beauty of an artwork.

This opening move exhibits the absolutism of Plotinus. One sole and single thing must be the source of all kinds of beauty, of the quality in all things that are beautiful. If there is no sole common source of all beauties, then there is no beauty. Everything originates from the One or else there is nothing. Plotinus does not leave much of an alternative. Since there are beautiful things, there is only one possible answer: Everything originates from the One.

Plotinus’s transformation of the myth of Poros and Penia from Plato’s Symposium is instructive, as are the philosophic consequences of this transformation. He claims that love was born before the realm of senses came into being. Poros or possession is the Reason Principle (Logos, or the World-Soul), the hypostasis of the Intellectual Principle. Poros is intoxicated. What makes a person or a thing intoxicated is perhaps some substance received from the outside, a gift. The Reason Principle receives everything as a gift from the Intellectual Principle whose hypostasis it is. Poros (Logos) is intoxicated by the Intellectual Principle, which is the Mind or Nous. The intoxicated Poros falls into the lower level, matter, which is Penia, and fertilizes it. The originary motion of love is therefore hypostasis. Love originates from above, from the top of the hierarchy of the hypostases and descends from those heights. It therefore follows that if one begins to ascend, one does not need to employ tic energy or desire. If real Love comes from above, and if it becomes intoxicated by the Mind, by the supreme spiritual homogeneous beauty, then there would be no use for erotic energy. The love that comes from Penia is wholly poor. But what Penia desires is the Good. “The very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination.”34 Matter that is already impregnated by the soul desires the good, because it is impregnated by the soul indeterminately. The ascension that begins with the soul depends on reception. This is a kind of immaculate conception, for it is Logos that impregnates the passive matter and makes it desiring. Matter (Penia) receives the Logos (Soul, Poros) and while allowing itself to become impregnated by the Reason Principle it begins to hate itself. Matter begins to long for something else, something pure, the Good. It is not Erôs but self-disgust, the negative motion of of a self being repelled by itself, the desire to abolish dispersion that it comprises. That is the motivating force of ascension. Although this motivating force is the opposite of desire, it triggers the same kind of ascension as the energy of Erôs in Plato’s warm metaphysics of beauty. Therein for Plato the body itself could be embellished and become beautiful. In Plotinus, however, it is not just matter but also the body, even the ensouled body, that becomes repellent for the soul that dwells in it since the body also remains as matter.

There is a bipolarity here. On one extreme there is the Good, the One, which is both the source and the goal of love. On the other pole there is the Enemy, the Otherness, the Ugly, the Disgusting, the Evil. No energy generated by evil can be used for the good. It is the soul alone, moreover the purified soul, that desires Beauty.

The hidden point of reference in Plotinus’s concept of the beautiful is the concept of the Ugly. The absence of virtues also leaves an ugly soul in Plato. The democratic and the tyrannical souls are by definition ugly as much as the aristocratic and harmonious soul is essentially beautiful. But there is no place for the absolute ugly in Plato, for he does not employ Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory. In Aristotle matter (hulê) is sheer privation, passivity, or possibility. Plato did not need a concept of prime matter (materia prima), although a few philosophers discuss Plato’s mysterious philosophic character, Chora, as the first appearance of the notion “prime matter.” Plato, however, makes no use of the kind of matter that is located as the concept of content in the soul. This will be Plotinus’s suggestion. Plotinus needed this philosophic prop in order to answer the following question: How could the soul impregnate matter without having a concept of matter? What is necessary in the philosophy of hypostases is not so in Plato’s metaphysics, not even for his creation story in the Timaeus.

In Plotinus matter is mere potentiality. Yet mere potentiality, matter without form, is not only negative and privation; it is also ugly because of its complete isolation from all spiritual hypostases. This is why the strenuous process of purification borrowed from religious rituals and traditions, which played a certain role in all kinds of Platonism, has assumed chief importance in Plotinus’s concept of the beautiful.

Interestingly, the problem of the ugly is raised at the point when Plotinus begins to lead us upwards to find the common source of all things beautiful. Beauty is purity, so we must find out what purity means. But one understands purity better if one begins to ponder first what impurity means. Since all of the things that we see or sense, including ourselves, are not entirely pure, we get more direct access to the impure than to the pure. the absolutely impure is the absolutely Ugly.

There is no such concept in Plato. He never needed it because the starting point of the ascent was not the matter in its isolation from the Divine. On this issues Plato was not yet a full-fledged metaphysician, but Plotinus was.

Plotinus asks the leading questions in the following order: “All these noble qualities are to be received and loved . . . but what entitles them to be called beautiful? They exist: they manifest themselves to us. Anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being, and is not Real Being really beautiful?”35 But Plotinus asks what property makes those real beings really beautiful, or rather what property makes beings real beings. Thus he continues: “Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul . . . .”36 The ugly soul is the dissolute soul. But what has spoiled it? What has made it dissolute and unclean?

Plotinus guides us into a definite direction. The ugly soul leads a life that is “smoldering dully under the crust of evil, that sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark?”37 This image of death does not evoke the mythological Thánatos. It is rather a straightforward description of natural death: dissolution into the manifold, loss of the center, of memory, of spirit, of the soul. But it is precisely natural death, our falling back into nature, which will be mythologized. Death is absolute forgetfulness, which is not unity but manifoldness. It is the state before desire or of the impossibility of desire. The nothing, the ugliness, is also low and dark. Matter and evil, death and matter, matter and nothing are identified. The unclean soul and unclean things lure us into the opposite of ascent, that is, into death. The body that is constantly preoccupied with matter falls into the abyss and dies.

The ugly condition of the soul, according to Plotinus, is caused by “the alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to purify himself and to make himself as he was.”38 What is ugly for Plotinus? Not the barbaric instincts that tear an individual apart as in Plato’s metaphor of the tyrannical soul, but rather the mere absence of Mind. Plotinus continues: “The soul becomes ugly—by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself to the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter.”39 Here we encounter again the signature of Plotinus’s reasoning. This abstruse, extremist metaphysician draws his fundamental idea from everyday observation.

Plotinus has fulfilled his promise to give us access to the beautiful through the discussion of the ugly. If the ugly is heteronomous, the alien material, then the most beautiful is the thing without any alien material. And here we are back to Plato again in putting the emphasis on the homogeneity of the spiritual-intellectual Beauty. In a completely homogenous thing, one does not find alien material. Plato has only alluded to this conception, but Plotinus showed us the way to understand the message of this truth with his seemingly so abstract, verily so empirically inspired mind.

Beauty is. It is to this Being, Truth, Good that we ascend. We start the ascension as nature for nature is also besouled and not to be mistaken for the passive, ugly, and evil nothing, matter, although it is also matter. The Soul arrives first at the Intellectual Principle to “survey the beautiful ideas—the Ideas are all identical with Beauty . . . What is beyond the Intellectual Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. . . . The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and principle of Beauty: the Primal Beauty has the one dwelling place, and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There.”40 This is a strictly hierarchized Ideal Universe, but there is Beauty at all levels.

Beauty is Being; it is. How do we know the Beauty that is? Beauty is also related to our faculty of judgment: “the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty—one incomparably sure in the appreciated of its own, when Soul entire is enlisted to support its judgment.”41 The judgment, the affirmation of beauty, is founded in the ideal form. But whence comes the ideal form?

The Platonic solution lies at hand. The ideal of beauty emerges from recollection (anamnesis). Plotinus also mentions recollection, but he has a more radical thing in mind: The true recognition of Beauty is the outcome of the purification of the soul. The more beautiful the soul becomes, the more it can recognize beauty. The concept of the beautiful is seated deeply in our mind, and we have to work on our soul that it should become like the concept. This is the art of making our soul beautiful. It is an art, for Plotinus compares it to the work of the sculptor, which can begin because it is the Reason principle (Poros) that has descended upon Penia. It can be recovered from Penia. Purification is an act of artistic perfection.

This is Plotinus’s second description of the strenuous process of purification. He sets his ambition higher than in the first account. At first he describes how our elimination of the alien element, of matter, makes us good. Then he explicates how it is through the act of self-sculpting that we create our soul as a soul that is finally ready to arrive at the steepest station of the ascent. After the accomplishment of self-creation our soul becomes sun like so that it will see the sun with eyes closed.

In Plotinus’s stronger version of purification we do not just need to eliminate the alien material; rather the good material itself needs to be chiseled so that the soul becomes the faculty of judgment that appreciates the Supreme Beauty. Thus Plotinus writes:

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful. Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast. Never cease chiseling your statue until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you . . . established a stainless shrine.42

This is certainly a technological model of the purification of the soul. One does not really purify it, but forms it according to a model just like an artist does. Matter, that is, the soul is already homogeneous and spotless. I doubt whether this second model of purification has any relevance for us moderns given that we do not have an idea of the perfect statue in us. But it was exactly through this model that the relationship between being beautiful and judging beauty could be addressed. This chiseled, perfected, ideal kind of soul is “the only eye that sees mighty Beauty . . . To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did the eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.”43

Plotinus has no warm concept of the beautiful. Love is discussed without even the mention of happiness. Beauty is beheld by the pure soul but no erotic energy is transmitted. But Plotinus has no cold concept of the beautiful either. He regards with great interest rather than with indifference, contempt, or fear the ensouled nature and its manifoldness. Plotinus is not afraid. His soul is not trembling. His eye rests with adoration and confidence on the Beauty that he beholds.

Notes

1. Plato, Symposium in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 566 (215b).

2. Symposium, pp. 552–553 (200e-201a).

3. Symposium, p. 557 (205). Diotima says at first that Aphrodite is the daughter of Poros and Penia, but later she says that Erôs is their son. It is important to note here that in Aristotle’s description of friendship (Philia) possession and need are not separated. In prote Philia, so Aristotle assures us, we need exactly what we possess and vice versa.

4. This scenario (the loss of the mother) can also be read as an echo of the speech by Aristophanes.

5. This is also an important motif in Plato’s Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

6. Symposium, p. 542 (189–190).

7. Nietzsche, “The Gay Science” in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

8. The so-called “Platonic love,” together with the expression was invented by Ficino. Ficino, in contrast, presented us with a more earthly model of amour passion. See Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985).

9. As is well known, Plato distinguishes among three kinds of madness in the Ion and then in the Phaedrus: they are poetic madness, prophetic madness, and amatory madness.

10. Symposium, pp. 544–545 (192).

11. This distinction follows that of Nietzsche from The Birth of Tragedy. In The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ibid.

12. Plato, The Republic, Book IX. In this part of The Republic Plato provides an account of the genesis of the tyrannical man. Nietzsche remarked that Plato must have had a terrible sexual drive to be so much afraid of it. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

13. Symposium, p. 567 (216a).

14. Symposium, p. 567 (216c).

15. Symposium, p. 567 (215d).

16. See also Plato’s Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus.

17. Sartre undertakes a very similar phenomenological description of love in Being and Nothingness.

18. Many interpreters of the Symposium emphasize the point that all previous speeches had been included, although mostly in a very modified form, into Diotima’s/Socrates’s speech.

19. I here play on the title of a work by Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

20. Socrates’s allusion to the erotic mythological significance of the beautiful location shows that he does not play the role of the seducer.

21. Phaedrus, p. 496 (249e).

22. Symposium, pp. 562–563 (211c-d).

23. Symposium, p. 563 (211d).

24. Symposium, p. 563 (212b-c).

25. The Republic, pp. 571–572.

26. Plato, Cratylus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 452 (416c).

27. Cratylus, p. 452 (416e). When I discuss the warm and cold versions of Plato’s concept of the beautiful, I do not have in mind the temporal sequence of the dialogues. E.g., the Phaedo was certainly conceived before Phaedrus. I read the two dialogues, Symposium and Phaedrus, where the warm theory of the beautiful is elaborated, as a kind of confession by Plato about his younger self.

28. The identity of perfection and beauty became problematic in the philosophy of art in which no metaphysical edifice buttresses the conception.

29. Plato’s ê is not identical with art, although the Platonist reception of Plato understood it as such. But creation as activity that results in the perfect realization of the idea—this model of creative activity is already there in Plato.

30. There are three descriptions of ascent in Republic, the most popular being the one associated with the cave simile. See The Republic 476 b.

31. The Republic, 476c.

32. Needless to say, this remedy is as important as other remedies. Kant’s intuitions were similar, but he does not offer any firm remedies. This is explained in my next chapter.

33. Plato, Timaus in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 1164–65 (33a-d, 34a-b).

34. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London and New York: Penguin, 1991), p.

35. Ibid., p. 50.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 51.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., p. 55.

41. Ibid., p. 48.

42. Ibid., p. 54.

43. Ibid., p. 55.