Sokrates’ große Liebe. Der philosophische Eros in den Dialogen Platons

Abstract

In the platonic dialogues, there is but one exception to the socratic confession of ignorance: Socrates claims for himself a knowledge of the erotica, of love matters. In this paper the connection between the platonic concept of philosophy, which is developed along the lines of the paradigm of the ignorant Socrates, and the role of Eros in platonic conversations is scrutinized. This connection displays not only dramatic-literary and performative, but also dialectical aspects: Plato puts Socrates onstage in his physicalness and his overcoming of fleshliness as a philosophical Eros. Plato, the ›poet-philosopher‹, uses this performance primarily in order to visualize something genuinely conceptual, namely, the revolutionary adventure of his theory of ideas. This theory constitutes a new foundation of cognition on a truly conceptual basis and, as Diotima’s conception of love shows, does not result in a rationalistic reduction of the notion of Eros or in an anti-hedonistic intellectualism, but leads to the ultimate lust that humans can achieve: to a view on the ›ocean of beauty‹.