Loving Persons Platonically

Abstract

Platonic love may be culturally dead. Academically it has come to life again, above all through the vigour and acumen of a well-known discussion by Gregory Vlastos, 'The Individual as Object of Love in Plato', in his Platonic Studies (Princeton University Press, 1973). Vlastos pays Plato the tribute not of faded reverence, but of lively disparagement. He casts Plato as the champion of a 'spiritualized egocentricism' (30), a man 'scarcely aware of kindness, tenderness, compassion, concern for the freedom, respect for the integrity of the beloved, as essential ingredients of the highest type of interpersonal love' (ib.), who could not allow 'that the ultimate purpose of the creative act should be to enrich the lives of persons who are themselves worthy of love for their own sake' (31). Even as a lover, it appears, Plato was a fascist. One might take this response to be a straightforward revaluation of a familiar story. In the Symposium ascent, the lover advances from a single beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, to the beauty of practices, to the beauty of the sciences, and so to the Form of Beauty itself (21 Ic). If these are successive objects of love, it would seem at once to follow that 'personal affection ranks ... low in Plato's scala amoris' (31), a ranking that might well tell against Plato, not personal affection. We may suggest, however, that moral disapproval is rather a mild response to a doctrine which, for all its superficial familiarity, would be largely bizarre. Loving Beauty itself is perhaps alright because a mystery (illumined by a heterosexual metaphor in 212a). And loving a single beautiful body, which sounds wrong to us (what one loves, however physically, are persons, not mindless bodies), becomes alright once we bear in mind that the Platonic body is not unconscious and Cartesian: it is not only a sine qua non (Phaedo 65a), but also a subject (83d, 94b-e), of pleasures, passions, even opinions, of a kind. But then loving all beautiful bodies, not just one, is Don Juanism. To quote da Ponte: 'It's all love. Who is faithful to one is cruel to the others; I, who have an overabundance of sentiment, love them all.' While loving practices and sciences seems utterly not on. In illustration, consider the erotic symptoms of Phaedrus 251 (inevitably compared to Sappho at the wedding-feast). Are these to be discarded (which would be a loss)? Or are they to be transferred, by a kind of abstract fetishism, to the contemplation of, say, the Lycurgan