Articles

THE PLATONIC SAGE IN LOVE

THE PLATONIC SAGE IN LOVE

John Dillon

Studia Humaniora Tartuensia, vol. 4 (2003)

Abstract

This article explores the nature of the erotic impulse set forth in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, and in the myth of the Phaedrus, with a view to deciding how far Plato intends it to be a purely selfish process. After all, in the ‘ladder of ascent’ to the Beautiful Itself in Symp. 210-12, the individual beloved seems to be left behind, and even disdained, and Plato has been criticised for this, by such authorities as Gregory Vlastos. I argue that this cannot really have been Plato’s intention, and adduce the later Platonist discussion about the proper form that a philosophic love-affair should take.



Love, as we know, in Greek thought (as, I suppose, in most other thought), is habitually regarded as an irrational force. Objectified as the goddess Aphrodite, or her follower and agent (only sometimes son) Eros, it is presented by poets and moralists as a form of madness or intoxication that may strike almost at random, leading the most sensible persons to do the most foolish things. The lines of the lyric poet Ibycus are often quoted in this connexion (Fr. 2 Bergk / 287 Campbell):

“Again Love, looking at me meltingly from under his dark eyelids, hurls me with his manifold enchantments into the boundless nets of the Cyprian. How I fear his onset, as a prize-winning horse, now old, but still yoke-bound, goes, all unwillingly, with swift chariot to the race.”

This is a lively portrayal of what was the conventional poetic (and educated layman’s) view of love. It is notable that we have this passage of Ibycus because Plato himself makes the philosopher Parmenides refer to it1 in his dialogue of that name, as a preface to Parmenides’ overtly unwilling embarkation upon the eminently philo- sophical activity of dialectic. But Plato’s very use of it serves to point up the contrast between the behaviour proper to a philosopher and that characteristic of a poet, or non-philosopher in general. Parmenides here, with ironic hesitation, gives way to an essentially rational impulse, while borrowing the words of one giving way to an irrational one, such as a true philosopher should never yield to.

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