Plato and eros

“To sum up then,” she said, “love is the desire to have the good forever. […] Love’s function is giving birth in beauty both in body and in mind.”
-- Diotima; Plato, The Symposium

The concept of the Divided Line is one of the most important in Plato’s works. In The Republic, the four stages of cognition, from lowest to highest, are:
-- Imagining – images in the world of appearances;
-- Belief – visible things in the world of appearances;
-- Thinking – mathematical objects in the intelligible world; and
-- Intelligence or knowledge – the world of Forms (the highest Form being the Good) in the intelligible world.
The Symposium, a work about eros (love), follows this division of the stages of cognition.

Phaedrus argues that love ennobles both the lover and the beloved. Pausanias holds that there are two kinds of love: the common kind and the heavenly kind. Erixymachus says that love is a biochemical balance that leads to peace of the mind. Aristophanes contends that each individual is only one half of a self, and thus that love is a primal urge for wholeness. Note that these notions of love are based only upon the world of appearances. Socrates, telling the others about his teacher Diotima, expands on these to arrive finally at the Form of Love.

Just as a father is always a father of someone (that is, either a son or daughter), Love is always love of something. Thus Love always desires or is in want of something. It follows that Love cannot want or desire something it already has in possession; Love is, therefore, love of something, of something that he currently needs and does not have in possession already.

If we admit that Love is love of good and beautiful things, Love is neither good nor beautiful. But this does not mean he is bad and ugly; he is something in between the two. Just as “right opinions” are in the mean between wisdom and ignorance, Love is in the mean between good and bad and between beautiful and ugly. Love is not a god. A god is, by definition, happy because he is in possession of good and beautiful things. But love is not a mortal either; he is a spirit who is intermediate between gods and men. Diotima explains that Love is the son of Resource (Plenty) and Poverty; he was conceived the same day that Aphrodite was born so he loves beauty. He shares both parents’ characteristics: he is poor in good and beautiful things, but able to make means to achieve them. He is amoral, and lives and dies. He is a philosopher because he always searches for wisdom (one of the most beautiful things).

But what is the use of Love to man? Love is a love of beautiful and good things, and is the desire to have possession of the good forever. The teleological aim is that possession of the good causes happiness.

What function does Love have? Diotima argues that if the object of Love is to have the good always, it follows that we desire immortality as well; the object of love is not merely beauty, but rather the reproduction and birth in beauty. Sex and reproduction are the ways “mortal things have a share in immortality”; this explains the enthusiasm many organisms have for love. There are two kinds of love, then. Firstly, one can be “pregnant in the body”, where one loves physical objects and people, and where one’s aim in Love is physical reproduction. The second kind of love is where one is “pregnant in the mind”, and achieves immortality with virtue and thoughts. Diotima provides the example of Achilles participating in war to achieve immortality – this is described as a form of Love.

In the first stages of life, one is attracted to physical beauty. Later, one is attracted to beauty of the mind. When it is realised that all kinds of beauty have something in common, the real philosopher can “gaze” at the Form of Beauty, which is absolute unchanging infinite beauty. This Form of Beauty, ultimately, is the real object of Love, which can then produce real virtue and thus achieve immortality.

So if a genie offered me the chance to either have the love of a hot girl or gaze upon the Form of Beauty both for my entire life, which one would I pick? A dilemma indeed.