APPENDIX
Acting for Love in the Symposium
1. POSSESSING THE OBJECT OF LOVE
In chapter 4 I claim that to love the divine or anything else in a Platonic sense is to try to imitate its nature insofar as that is possible, and I argue that this is the sort of love Aristotle refers to when he says the Prime Mover moves as an object of love. However, there are questions that might arise for this story with respect to the interpretation, not so much of Aristotle as of Plato’s Symposium. There is a sense in which this interpretation of the Symposium is obviously correct. At the very beginning of Socrates’ encomium to love, Diotima argues that love is the desire for happiness, and that happiness—the possession of the good and beautiful forever—is the divine condition (Symp. 204d3–e7). Thus love is one form of the universal desire to be like a god. However, it might be thought that for Plato it is not the gods, but the beautiful that is the object of love. In the Symposium, assimilation to the divine is a welcome but unintended consequence of loving the beautiful—which activity is not an imitation of the beautiful. So treating something as an object of love in the Platonic sense is not a matter of approximating it. If this is correct, then my claim that the Symposium supports a traditional reading of Metaphysics Ë, according to which the first heaven expresses its love for the Prime Mover by approximating it, is false. Platonic love does not imitate its object. Thus, if Aristotle is referring to Platonic love in Metaphysics Ë.7, he is not referring to a relation of approximation (or so the objection would go).
Of course, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is also divine. So we might reply to this objection by saying that, as a matter of fact, Diotima ultimately denies that to kalon is the object of love. At 206e2–3 she tells Socrates that “love is not of the beautiful, as you think.” Instead, love is “of generation and giving birth in the beautiful.” Since generation turns out to be the mortal approximation to immortality, why not conclude that the object of love is the divine insofar as it is immortal? In this account, the effect of love would be to imitate its object—in this case the immortal and divine.
The question at issue is what, according to Diotima, love wants. Does it want immortality and divinity, which it achieves by approximation? Or does it want something beautiful and ultimately the Beautiful itself? Despite Diotima’s claim at 206e2–3, it is not at all clear that she ever truly abandons the idea that love is of the beautiful. For even after the discussion of reproduction and immortality, she describes the lover at different stages of the ascent as a lover of various beautiful things: Explicitly, he is said to be a lover of beautiful bodies (Symp. 210a7, 210b4–5), and if we follow the pattern established in these passages, he becomes a lover of beautiful souls, customs, knowledge, “a great sea of beauty,” and finally of the Beautiful itself. Furthermore, Diotima says that seeing or knowing the Form of the Beautiful is the ultimate goal, or telos, of love (210e2–6, 211c1–2). Thus, the beautiful is always, in some sense, the object at which love aims.
Furthermore, when Diotima tells Socrates that love aims at giving birth in the beautiful, I do not think she can mean that beauty is only contingently related (as a necessary breeding ground) to the lover’s ultimate object of giving birth. Beauty is the appropriate breeding ground for love because love’s offspring is beautiful. For instance, the logoi, which the lover releases through his contact with the beautiful, are themselves described as beautiful (Symp. 210a8, 210d4–5). Of course, they are also described as virtuous, and at the apex of the ascent Diotima says that the lover stops producing images of virtue and gives birth to the true thing. This suggests that those logoi that the lover begat lower on the ladder of love and that Diotima described as beautiful are in some way or other images of virtue (or at least that some of them are). But this only supports my suggestion that giving birth in beauty is a matter of giving birth to beauty. Virtue, after all, in addition to being good, is also beautiful. What Diotima seems to want to forestall, then, when she says at 206e2–3 that “love is not of the beautiful as you think” (my emphasis) is a simple-minded equation of the lover’s goal with beauty, such as Aristophanes and Agathon had made in their earlier speeches. Love is, of course, attracted to the beautiful person. But love is also, and more truly, of the beautiful words and deeds the lover produces under the influence of love, and through which he has a share of immortality. But in claiming that love aims in a direction other than we might have thought, Diotima is not denying that love’s ultimate object is essentially beautiful.
The upshot, then, is that I cannot straightforwardly make the following argument about the Symposium : The object of love is immortality; lovers, with the aid of the beautiful, try to come as close to immortality as possible; therefore acting for the sake of the object of love, according to Diotima, is approximating that object as closely as possible. For, as I argued above, Platonic love is also of the beautiful and of the good. Indeed, it is hard to understand why anyone would desire immortality at all unless he was thinking of it as divine immortality, that is, immortal possession of the good and the beautiful. It is not immediately obvious, then, that the Platonic lover’s relationship to his end is one of approximation.
So let us turn to the Symposium and Socrates’ and Diotima’s discussion of the nature of love. There are two things I hope to show. First, that even when Plato (via Aristophanes and Diotima) conceives of love as aiming at possession of the beautiful, he is conceiving of human beings as always achieving that end by approximating a more perfect possession: divine possession. To aim at the beautiful, in love, is to try to become like a god. Thus, love always acts for the sake of its end by imitating the divine. Second, I want to suggest that imitating the divine is, itself, a way of approximating the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful. Or, in other words, the gods possess these Forms by becoming like them. Thus, when we imitate the gods’ possession of the Good and the Beautiful, we imitate their approximation to the Good and the Beautiful.
Two preliminary points that Socrates discusses with Agathon before his speech proper are worth our attention. First of all, Socrates argues, in opposition to the earlier encomiasts who described love as divine and beautiful, that love is a state of insufficiency. This conclusion is meant to follow from the claims that love takes an object—in Socrates’ words, love is always of something—and that this object is an object of desire (Symp. 199e6–7). Since we do not desire what we already have, it must follow that we do not have in the appropriate way whatever it is that we love.1 Either we do not have it at all, or we do have it but do not hold it as securely as we would like.2
Love, then, is a state of insufficiency. But from this we should not infer that it is a state of mere deprivation. Instead, love is somehow intermediate between privation and fulfillment. This is the point of Diotima’s own myth about the origins of love (Symp. 203b2–e5). Love, she says, is the child of Poverty, scrounging around the gates of a party, and Resourcefulness, one of the guests, sated to drunkenness. Thus, it is the heritage of Love both to lack the beautiful and good and also to be endowed with the cunning necessary for attaining it. Diotima seems to want to make two points with this myth. First of all, she wants to say that although love is a condition of lacking the beautiful, it is a state of felt deprivation. It does not possess its good, but it is not ignorant of this fact either. Thus, it is an intermediate state. Second, and related, unlike a state of mere deprivation, love is a positive, hopeful orientation toward what will satisfy the lover’s lack. In both these senses, love is analogous to right opinion: neither missing the truth entirely nor having an account of the truth that would render its grip on truth secure (Symp. 201e10– 202b5).3 (Another point of analogy: Just as true opinion can mistake itself for knowledge, so too a lover can mistake his condition for divine happiness.)4 Thus, Diotima says that love stands between the divine and the merely mortal, between ignorance and wisdom. Love is not a god—he is not happy and in possession of the good and the beautiful—but his seeking is directed toward what will satisfy his insufficiency. Or, to put the personification in human terms, being in love is not itself the possession of happiness; it is the condition of pursuing what (one thinks) will fill the want and thereby bring happiness.5
The idea that love is a state of insufficiency aiming at fulfillment is one we have already encountered in the Symposium in Aristophanes’ speech. According to Aristophanes, lovers long for their “other half” from whom divine justice has permanently separated them (Symp. 190b5–191a6; 193a1–3). Lovers cannot ever be reunited with their other halves in a completely satisfactory way—i.e., a way that would once again put them in a position to rival the happiness of the gods. (Preventing this was precisely the reason Zeus chopped them in half to begin with.) Nevertheless, Aristophanes says that in love (and in particular, sexual love) we can come as close to that perfect union as is possible for us (Symp. 191c8–d3, 192e5–193a1). So Aristophanes and Dio-tima agree that love is desire, and thus deprivation, seeking its natural object.
Aristophanes and Diotima disagree in one respect, however, relevant to our Aristotelian purposes. According to Aristophanes, the object of love is to approximate as closely as possible our antecloven state. Lovers want to approach as closely as they can the state of being one entity, physically and metaphysically (Symp. 192d3–e4). This desire is not an odd and brute desire, according to Aristophanes’ story, since lovers’ desire for reunion is a desire to return to a position that rivaled the gods. The rather pathetic couplings of the split lovers are attempts to achieve a semblance of that godlike happiness they used to have when they were whole.6 Now, Diotima agrees that ordinary love is an approximation to something else. Furthermore, she agrees that this other state is the condition of divine happiness (Symp. 202b10–d11). But in Diotima’s account, Aristophanes has misidentified the nature of the divine happiness lovers approximate. For Aristophanes, the lover seeks a reunion with this beautiful person. Sex is an approximation of a union with this beloved. The implication is clearly that perfect union with a particular beautiful person is divine, or at least as divine as we aspire to. Diotima, on the other hand, suggests that the sense of insufficiency that drives a lover toward a particular beautiful thing cannot be completely satisfied by the possession of that beautiful thing. For the true object of love, in her account, transcends any particular person with whom we might happen to fall in love. Love is a desire for divine happiness, all right, but life spent with a single good or beautiful thing could not satisfy this desire. Instead, as Diotima says later, divine happiness comes through the possession of the Good and the Beautiful themselves; all other beloveds are merely approximations to these true objects of love (Symp. 211b2–3, 212a2–5).7 Thus, contra Aristophanes, love is not, strictly speaking, a desire for the particular sensible beloved. Love of a particular beautiful thing can only be an inadequate approximation of the complete possession of the Beautiful or the Good itself, achieved most perfectly (for human beings, at least) by knowing the Form.
This is why, I believe, Diotima describes love as a desire for generation and immortality (Symp. 206e2–207a4). These desires are not separate from the desire for the good or beautiful. Rather, they are desires for possessing the good and beautiful in a particular, that is to say, permanent way (or something as close to that as possible for a mortal creature).8 What the philo-sophical (as opposed to the Aristophanic) lover learns at the end of his ascent is that the enduring, sufficient possession of the good and beautiful for which he longs can be achieved only by the godlike contemplation of the Form (Symp. 212a2–7). All those other beautiful things that are ordinarily taken to be the proper objects of love are, in fact, only images of the truly beautiful (Symp. 211b2–3, 212a4). It is impossible, therefore, for a lover’s grasp of them to be anything more than an image of the true grasp he desires. Sex and conversations with the beloved aim at the birth of children and the production of logoi and noble deeds. But the significance of these productions can only be understood when we see them as imperfect attempts at a more perfect, eternal possession of the more perfectly good and beautiful.
I hope all this is enough to show that, according to the Symposium, the behavior ordinarily associated with love (and with all the lower rungs of the ladder of love) is in fact an approximation to possession of the more ultimate object of love understood as divine happiness. In other words, whenever someone falls in love, whether he realizes it or not, he creates, to the extent possible for him at that time, an approximation of the divine condition.9
The account of love Socrates develops in his second speech in the Phaedrus makes it clearer that love aims at imitating, insofar as possible, the divine condition.10 According to Socrates’ myth, all human souls have followed in the chorus of one of the Olympian gods (Phaedrus 248a1–4, 249e4–250a1). When they become embodied and fall in love, not only do they take their beloved to be an image of a god, the beloved actually is an image of the god that lover followed (Phaedrus 251a1–7, 252e1–2, 253b1–4).11 Thus, unlike the particular lover in the Symposium, which is described only as beautiful, the beloved in the Phaedrus is not only beautiful but quasi-divine. The Phaedran lover expresses his love by trying to make himself like the god he sees reflected in his beloved. The lovers “are well equipped to track down their god’s true nature with their own resources because of their driving need to gaze at the god [i.e., at the boy who is the image of the god],12 and as they are in touch with the god by memory they are inspired by him and adopt his customs and practices, so far as a human being can share a god’s life (kath’ hoson dunaton theou anthrôpôi metaschein)” (Phaedrus 253a1– 5; cf. Phaedrus 252c3–d: the lover imitates [mimoumenos eis to dunaton] the god he followed; and 248a: the soul, while in heaven, is said to “make itself most like” [eikasmenê] the god it follows). But at the same time that love is a desire for divinity, it is also a desire to “feast on” the Beautiful itself, for the shock of love is caused not so much by seeing the god in the beloved as by seeing the Beautiful in him (Phaedrus 215a3: the boy imitates [memimêmenon] beauty well). It is the sight of an image of the Beautiful that causes the lover’s wings to sprout and thereby initiates the 3,000-year (if he’s lucky) journey back to the Beautiful itself (Phaedrus 251c5–8). (In fact, the Beautiful is not the only Form the soul will see when it returns to the god’s chorus, but notice that all the Forms mentioned are either the Beautiful or forms of virtues that are, presumably, beautiful themselves; Phaedrus 247d5–7, 254b5–6.) Thus, the Phaedrus agrees with the Symposium that love is a desire to possess the Good and the Beautiful by approximating divine happiness.
But how do the gods possess the Good and the Beautiful? This brings me to the second point concerning Platonic love that I want to discuss. In my interpretation of the Metaphysics, I appealed to the idea that Platonic love is an imitation of its telos. But as I have described the accounts in the Symposium and Phaedrus so far, it looks as if Platonic love as experienced in human life seeks, in an imperfect way, to possess one of its ends—the Beautiful—and, in so doing, imitates the other—the divine. In other words, it is not yet clear that love seeks to approximate its object.
Here again the Phaedrus can help us. It is true, in both the Phaedrus and Symposium that souls possess the Good and the Beautiful by contemplating the Forms. How this works is, I confess, obscure to me. But one thing is perfectly clear: The gods and all divine things are beautiful and good (Phae-drus 246d8–e1). (Recall that in the Phaedrus the human beloved reminds his lover of both his god and the Beautiful; surely one reason the beloved is an image of the god is that he is beautiful.) That is to say, the gods possess the Good and the Beautiful in the typical Platonic way: They participate in those Forms. Their possession is perfect precisely because they necessarily are beautiful and good (Symp. 202c). But since participation is approximation, that means that the divine condition is the most perfect approximation of the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful. Their condition is only an approximation, however. In whatever way it is that Plato imagines souls become good and beautiful by contemplating these realities, it is significant that the gods in the Phaedrus must make periodic journeys to the field of Forms (they do not live with the Forms continually) and that they must feed on the Forms (Phaedrus 247a8–c2, d1–5). The gods are not good and beautiful in the way that the Forms themselves are; rather, the gods participate in the perfect being of the Beautiful as parts of the world of becoming. Thus, in the Phaedrus, lovers become like the Good and the Beautiful by imitating the gods they follow. The same holds, I suggest, for the Symposium. Sensible beautiful things, divine happiness, reproduction in the beautiful, the Beautiful itself are not mutually exclusive answers to “What is the object of love?” All love objects are, or are approximations of, the Beautiful, and all lovers become like the thing they love as much as possible.
Why, then, does Plato need to conceive the lover’s activity as an approximation of the divine at all? Why not just skip the divine altogether? Although I have argued that love is ultimately a desire to become like the Beautiful, we cannot avoid the fact that Plato is no less committed to thinking of love as an imitation of the divine. This is my suggestion. The problem with the Forms as objects of imitation for us is that we must imitate them in a life. How are we to imagine exemplifying the unchanging reality of the Forms? The natural way to do so is to imagine the life of a perfect living being, the life of a god.13 (Notice how in the Phaedrus human souls do not journey to the Forms on their own but seem to be able to get there only by following in the chorus of one of the gods, each of whom has his own way of life.) The gods by definition are most perfect approximations of the Good and the Beautiful, though what that similarity amounts to is hard, if not impossible, to say. (For one thing, they are always the cause of good [Rep. 379c] and cannot appear ugly [Rep. 381c].) Thus, in Plato’s account, our own loving approximation of beauty and goodness is best understood as an imitation of divinity. What is it to be like the unchanging Forms, perfectly in the realm of being and not of becoming? It is to be an immortal; and that is a condition we imitate by giving birth in beauty. But we should see that our imitation of the divine in this respect is itself a way of becoming as much like the Form as it is possible for us to be. Now from this point of view one might wonder, in Aristotelian fashion, what good the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful are doing in this story at all, since it is the gods who are the paradigms of living beauty. If I am correct that Aristotle invokes Platonic love in Metaphysics Ë.7, it is significant that the beautiful object of the first heaven’s love is the divine itself. It reflects Aristotle’s general conviction that the transcendent Forms are a useless level of explanation. However, I hope I have shown that despite that difference, Aristotle can and does appeal to the form of teleology described in the Symposium.
2. THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF INTERMEDIATE OBJECTS OF LOVE
We saw in the section above that to love something, in the Platonic sense, is to join oneself to it by approximating it, insofar as that is possible. But reading the Symposium also reveals that this description of teleological approximation is seriously incomplete. Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Diotima’s account of love is that it is a story of the lover’s ascent from a lower to a higher way of living (Symp. 210a1 ff.). True, erotic love of all different kinds of beautiful things is ultimately a desire for the Beautiful and Good.
But more important, provided that the lover is the right sort of person and is led correctly and in order, love is a developmental process from images of the object of love to the genuine article (Symp. 210e2–5, 211b7–d1). Beginning with the love of beautiful bodies, the lover, in virtue of his experience, falls in love with a succession of more perfectly beautiful objects, from beautiful souls to beautiful customs and practices, to the sciences, then to a “vast sea of beauty,” until at last he loves directly the Form of the Beautiful, which was what he truly desired all along.14 It is evident, then, that in Diotima’s account the lower experiences of love do not simply approximate the perfect experience. They provide an opening through which the lover may ultimately be led to feel the attractions of the Good his experiences approximate. 15 It is precisely because the lower rungs are similar to their telos that they are able to serve this educational purpose. Indeed, part of what is beautiful about the lower objects of love and the products to which the lover gives birth in their presence is not just their similarity to to kalon itself but their ability to direct the noble lover to the Good. Or, to switch dialogues to the Phaedrus, the experience of falling in love is not simply one of seeing the god reflected in the beloved but one of sprouting wings to return to his service.
The educational aspect of Plato’s account of erotic love might raise doubts as to its suitability as a model for the way in which Aristotle’s happy philosopher chooses morally virtuous actions for the sake of contemplation. My idea was that the Platonic model of love describes agents acting noninstru-mentally in a broad sense for the sake of an ulterior end. Their pursuing an intermediate object of love is for the sake of possessing the ultimate object, not by producing it, but by approximating it. Since the intermediate object is an imitation of something intrinsically valuable, it too will be worth choosing for its own sake. Furthermore, the Platonic model was supposed to show how agents need not be aware that their intrinsically valuable action (the middle-level end) has an end beyond the immediate one. They can understand the subordinate end as a most final end, choiceworthy for its own sake alone. But if Plato’s account of love in the Symposium is essentially an account of moral education, we may wonder whether his objects of love are not merely instrumentally valuable after all.
It is, in fact, a well-known criticism of Plato’s Symposium that Diotima does not, in the end, leave room for the lover to recognize any intrinsic value in the particular boy he began by loving.16 Instead, Diotima’s lover steps on the intermediate objects of love and leaves them behind as he climbs ever closer to the Form of the Beautiful.Worse still, as the lover climbs from love of a particular body to love of bodies in general and then on to love of a particular soul and from there to love of souls in general, Diotima claims that the lover despises the love he has just left behind (Symp. 210b5–6, c5–6, c7–d3). This disparaging attitude toward the intermediate objects of love is thought to be an inevitable part of this theory precisely because Plato conceives of them as images of and stages toward the ultimate object of erotic concern. Socrates began his instruction with Diotima assuming that love was of particular beautiful things (Symp. 204d5–6), but Diotima soon corrects him. It is hard not to read the passage at 206e2–5, where Diotima says that love is “not of the beautiful as you think” but is “of reproduction and birth in beauty,” as claiming that the lover does not really want the particular beloved but instead wants to be joined to the Beautiful itself through generation. The beloved himself is a mere necessary condition for the human ascent to the Forms.
Now although it is certainly true, in the Symposium, that the lover stops feeling erotic love for the initial beloved as he climbs the ladder, I believe it is a mistake to think that, when he does, the lover considers his former beloved as a mere instrument. True, there is a shift in attitude, but what changes is that the lover no longer sees the beloved as the ultimate object of his mad desire and longing—there are other things, arising from his reproduction with the beloved, that captivate him more. There is no reason to think, though, that the lover does not continue to see the beloved as beautiful and continue to want to spend time with him. This fact is clearer in the Phaedrus, where Socrates says that after philosophical lovers enslave their sexual appetites, they turn their attention jointly to the lifelong pursuit of understanding (256a7–c1). But although the Symposium focuses more on the individual ascent of the lover, there is reason to think that even there the lover continues to cherish his first beloved. Diotima says once the lover pregnant in soul gives birth in his beautiful beloved, he “in common with the beloved nurtures the newborn; such people, therefore, have much more to share [lit. have much more of a koinônia, a community or fellowship] than do the parents of human children, and have a firmer bond of friendship” (Symp. 209c4– 6).17 How are we to understand this friendship? Diotima explicitly invites us to compare the relationship between the philosophical lover and his beloved before and after the “birth” to the relationship between physical lovers. Let us see how Diotima describes that transition:
Footed and winged animals alike, all are plagued by the disease of Love. First they are sick for intercourse with each other, then for nurturing their young—for their sake the weakest animals stand ready to do battle against the strongest and even to die for them . . . they would do anything for their sake. (Symp. 207a7–b6)
It is clear that the physical lover, after he has given birth, turns his erotic attentions to his offspring. But his love for his offspring is now something he shares with his mate. In fact, their mutual love for the beautiful or divine happiness embodied in their offspring is the basis of the parents’ friendship. The same ought to be true of the lovers who give birth to logoi, then. The lover’s love of this particular beautiful person causes him to give birth to logoi. Once he does, he and the beloved both turn their love toward the speeches and arguments the lover has produced. Erotic love gives way to philosophical friendship. What the lover comes to despise, then, is not the beloved but his belief that he could most of all approximate divine happiness through possessing this person. As he progresses through the erotic mysteries, the lover comes to believe that happiness lies in each new level of rational understanding. But presumably, precisely because the more perfect vision of happiness was first reflected in this particular beautiful person, the lover chooses to be with his erstwhile beloved for his own sake, but now as a friend. (We can imagine that members of Aristotle’s audience experience a similar change in attitude toward their object of love. They begin by thinking that morally virtuous action is the key to a life worth living. But as the lectures progress, they come to see it as an approximation of contemplation. They continue to cherish morally virtuous action, not as the most important thing in life, but now as a reflection of their true love: theoretical wisdom.)
Thus I see no reason to read Diotima’s account of love as advocating an exploitative attitude toward the intermediate objects of love.18 Once the lover comes to see that his first love is a pale image of something better, he will, of course, no longer pursue him as the most ultimate object of his striving. But insofar as the first beloved continues to be an image of this ultimate object, he will continue to be as intrinsically valuable as anything in the natural world, in the Platonic account, can be.
1 If I am right that Meta. Ë.7 alludes to the Symposium, then this is another point of similarity between Platonic love and the relation between the heaven and the Prime Mover. So long as the heaven is a lover of the Prime Mover, it can approximate it, but it can never achieve its form fully.
2 Socrates argues that when it looks as if someone desires something he already has, what’s really happening is that he desires to keep what he already has (200d3–7). The connection between love and a desire for permanent possession of its object will become a centerpiece of Diotima’s account of love.
3 The analogy goes like this: Ignorance has no grasp of the truth (mortal condition without love has no grasp of happiness); knowledge holds it firmly (divine condition holds happiness firmly); and opinion has it, but only insecurely (the lover’s condition is an approximation of divine happiness). Of course, in the Republic Plato says that knowledge and opinion, because they are separate powers, must have different objects. This might seem to cast doubt on myclaim that knowledge and opinion grasp truth to varying degrees. However, because the objects of truth and opinion are related (viz., the latter is a shadowy reflection of the former, just as the object of love is an image of the divine condition), opinion has an insecure grasp on the truth in virtue of having an image of truth as its object.
4 Contra Price 1989, 20.
5 Is Diotima’s account mistaken here? She seems to be correct when she suggests that love opens the floodgates of desire for a condition in one’s own life that no mortal object of love could ever realistically provide. Spending time with a person we love allows us to imagine how happiness might be possible, but it is not (at least not normally) the entire content of that happy vision. Think of a stereotypical lover’s daydream: “And we can get married, and have a beautiful, old house that we’ll fix up, and have a garden where we’ll have parties for our interesting friends, and we’ll take regular, adventurous vacations. . . .” As this daydream suggests, however, Diotima does seem to go wrong—or at least not to do justice to our ordinary understanding of love and happiness—when she suggests that the ladder of love can be kicked away once happiness is achieved. Lovers want more than the beloved can provide, but the beloved’s presence seems to be a necessary element in the lover’s vision of happiness.
6 My student, Steven Simon, has pointed out that the circular shape and movements of the antecloven lovers mirror the circular shape and movements of their heavenly parents (Symp. 190b).
7 I will leave to one side the question of how the Good and the Beautiful are related in the Symposium.
8 Thus, lovers desire immortality not as a precondition for permanent possession of the good but as a mode of possessing the good. Or, to put it another way, lovers desire to have immortality “mixed in” with their possession of the good. (What Diotima literally says is that lovers “desire immortality with [the] good . . . if in fact love wants to possess the good always” [Symp . 207a1–3].)
In this reading, Diotima’s argument is (contra Rowe 1998, 248–249) quite plausible and to the point. If what we want is literally to possess the good and the beautiful forever, and if this is impossible, it makes a certain sense to approximate immortal possession of the good by generation. Procreation, after all, is not just a second-best immortality; it is a second-best way to possess forever the good as those pregnant in body conceive it. (These are the ones who typically express love through sex, according to Diotima [Symp 208e1–5].) For surely those pregnant in body believe happiness to be a mode of sensible existence. Thus, in procreation they replicate themselves in the only form through which they think it is possible to possess the good. (Thus I disagree with Rowe [1998] that reproduction is evidence only of a desire to live forever; it expresses a desire to live with the good forever.) Notice how two other of Diotima’s examples of reproduction replicate that aspect of a lover’s self to which his conception of happiness attaches. Achilles is mentioned as one of those who produce glorious deeds under the influence of love (Symp. 208c1–e1); but Achilles and the other lovers of honor surely identify their selves with their reputations and happiness with good reputation. Thus fame for them is not just an imitation of immortality; it is an imitation of immortal happiness. Finally, the psychic lovers who are initiates in the erotic mysteries are clearly philosophers (or at least they end up that way; Symp. 210d6) who identify their selves with their reason and assure its perpetual association with the philosophical good by producing good and beautiful logoi.
9 It is interesting to notice that Aristophanes’ lovers also need divine revelation to understand what their erotic desire is really for (Symp. 192d5).
10 I do not mean to treat the accounts of love in the Symposium and Phaedrus as entirely continuous; there are differences as well. In particular, since the Phaedrus espouses a belief in the immortality of all souls, it is not immortality in particular that Phaedran lovers imitate. However, with respect to what I am taking to be the core of Platonic love—that the lover acts for the sake of his beloved by imitating it—I believe the Phaedrus and Symposium are in agreement.
11 I agree with Ferrari (1987, 183) that the lover does not impose his vision of the god on the boy but develops the boy’s latent godlikeness.
12 Nehamas and Woodruff 1995, 42 n. 107. All translations of the Phaedrus are from Nehamas and Woodruff 1995.
13 As Sedley (1999, 312) notes, “the standard for justice is not the Form of justice. It is god.”
14 I do not want to venture here an opinion about how this process works. I will say, though, that it seems likely to me that it is not just the lover’s contemplation of the beautiful thing that leads him to the next level but also the experience of giving birth to logoi in its presence.
15 I thank Jonathan Lear for bringing this to my attention.
16 Most famously Vlastos [1969] 1981, 10, 20 ff. See also Adams (1999, 152 ff.) for a more detailed discussion of a similar criticism.
17 This and the next quotation from the Symposium are translated by Nehamas and Woodruff (1989).
18 Nothing I have said is meant to defend Plato from the other, related charge that the Platonic lover does not care for the individuality and particularity of the beloved, and thus does not truly love him (Vlastos [1969] 1981). See Ferrari (1987, 182–184) for a persuasive response to an aspect of Vlastos’s criticism. Still, his response leaves untouched the worries about particularity that Adams (1999, 156) raises. Love, he argues, ought to lead us to care about this particular person in a manner that’s different from our concern for other instantiations of the lovable kind. I will not discuss this problem here, however. Outside the context of interpersonal relations, we do not make it a requirement of desiring X for its own sake that we have the sort of concern for X’s particularity that Adams describes. This suggests that the problem of particularity is a problem for Plato’s account of love but not for using that account as a model for understanding Aristotle’s middle-level ends.