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Plato on True Love
Plato's account of true love is still the most subtle and beautiful there is.
Updated June 23, 2024 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
He whom love touches not walks in darkness. —Plato
If the Phaedrus is full of flirting, this is because, for Plato, the best friendship is that which lovers can have for each other. It is a philia that is born out of erôs, and that feeds back into erôs to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into a shared desire for a higher understanding of the self, the other, and the world.
As Nietzsche put it more than two thousand years later:
Here and there on this earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.
If eros can be transmuted into the best kind of philia, it can open up a blissful life of shared understanding in which desire, friendship, and philosophy are in perfect resonance with one another. This insight, which is Plato’s, is the origin and ancestor of our modern, democratic notion that romantic love is able to redeem us, or ‘save our life’, much as faith once did. Today, love is the new religion, even if this love is a far cry from the one that Plato had envisaged.
Plato’s philosophy of love is fleshed out in the Phædrus and Symposium. Like many Greeks of his era and social standing, he is much more interested in the pederastic desire that can exist between an older and a younger man, but there is no reason to suppose that his theory of love cannot extend to other kinds of erotic relationship.
That said, Plato does draw a distinction between the kind of love that can give rise to philia and a baser kind of love that is fallen into (rather than constructed) by those who are ‘more given to the body than to the soul’.
Rather than underpin the search for truth, this baser kind of love seems designed to impede it, and calls to mind the song of Lenina Crowne in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). In this ditty, Lenina compares love to soma, a hallucinogenic drug engineered to take users on hangover-free ‘holidays’. Soma, it is said, has ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol [but] none of their defects’.
Love, the Highest Form of Madness
In a filmed interview with a Buddhist monk, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (d. 1976) evinced a rare smile when he stated: “No man is without religion, and every man is in some way beyond himself, that is, mad.” [Kein Mensch ist ohne Religion, und jeder Mensch ist in gewisser Weise über sich hinaus, das heißt, verrückt.]
In the Phædrus, Socrates argues that, although madness can be an illness, it can also be the source of our greatest blessings (Chapter 9). This ‘divine madness’, he continues, has four forms: prophecy from Apollo; holy prayers and mystic rights from Dionysus; poetry from the muses; and—the highest form—love from Aphrodite and Eros.
The madness of love arises from seeing the beauty of the earth and being reminded of true, universal Beauty. Unfortunately, most earthly souls are so corrupted by the body, ‘that living tomb which we carry about’, that they lose all memory of the Universals. When their eyes fall upon the beauty of the earth, they are merely given over to pleasure, and like brutish beasts rush on to enjoy and beget.
But the earthly soul that is still able to remember true Beauty, and so to feel true love, reverences the face of his beloved as an expression of the divine—of Justice, Temperance, and Wisdom absolute. As his eyes catch those of his beloved, a shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration. The parts of the soul out of which the wings once grew, and which had hitherto been rigidly sealed, begin to melt open, and small wings begin to swell and grow from the root upwards:
Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itching—that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them.
The lover feels the utmost joy when he is with his beloved. When they are apart, the parts out of which the wings are growing begin to dry out and close, and the pain is such that they prize each other above all else.
The lover whose soul once followed in the procession of Zeus seeks out a beloved who shares in his god’s imperious and philosophical nature, and then does all he can to confirm this nature in him. Thus, the desire of the divinely inspired lover can only be fair and blissful to the beloved. In time, the beloved, who is no garden fool, comes to realize that his divinely inspired lover is worth more to him than all his other friends and kinsmen put together, and that neither human discipline nor divine inspiration could have brought him any greater blessing.
Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover will confer upon you … Whereas the attachment of the non-lover, which is alloyed with a worldly prudence and has worldly and niggardly ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your soul those vulgar qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in the world below.
The Ladder of Love
There is in terms of ideas covered a lot of overlap between the Phaedrus and Symposium. In the Symposium, Socrates slips into elenchus mode and gets the playwright Agathon to agree that if love is not of nothing, then it must be something, and if it is of something, then it must be of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is lacking.
Socrates then relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the art of love. This Diotima [‘Honoured by the gods’] told him that the something that Love lacks and desires consists of beautiful and good things, and especially of wisdom, which is both extremely good and extremely beautiful.
If Love lacks and desires beautiful and good things, and if all the gods are good and beautiful, then Love cannot, as most people think, be a god. In truth, Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need but always inventive. He is not a god but a great spirit [daimon] who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom [philosophos]. The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of good and beautiful things is called happiness [eudaimonia], and happiness is an end-in-itself.
Diotima then told Socrates the proper way to learn to love beauty. A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with every other beautiful body, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, the youth begins to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body. Having transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty. Finally, on the highest rung of the ladder of love, he is able to experience Beauty itself, rather than its various apparitions. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for Virtue herself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods. This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.
Love is the force of nature that enables us to ascend the ladder from earth to heaven and animal to god.
Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourself and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love end up being so small.
Love is the primal force which, in dissolving us, sublimes our lives.
Read more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
