(Plato) Where does this "Eros" start?
Hey~
I'm currently learning about Plato. In his conception of a virtuous soul (the chariot analogy), the intellect must be driven by a love (Eros) of the Good, as the soul is not a purely rational thing. This Eros for the Good is at the stem of the contemplative nature of dialectics, etc.
I heard, in the lectures I'm following, that Plato then spends a good portion of The Republic exploring how to instill this Eros for the Good in society.
My question is: if this Eros is not innate to the soul (having to be instilled in society), where does it start?
NOTE: I'm not trying to poke holes in Plato haha, just trying to understand his thinking! So if the answer is just 'that's never explained,' that's fine.
I'm currently learning about Plato. In his conception of a virtuous soul (the chariot analogy), the intellect must be driven by a love (Eros) of the Good, as the soul is not a purely rational thing. This Eros for the Good is at the stem of the contemplative nature of dialectics, etc.
I heard, in the lectures I'm following, that Plato then spends a good portion of The Republic exploring how to instill this Eros for the Good in society.
My question is: if this Eros is not innate to the soul (having to be instilled in society), where does it start?
NOTE: I'm not trying to poke holes in Plato haha, just trying to understand his thinking! So if the answer is just 'that's never explained,' that's fine.
Comments (38)
Eros is innate to the soul. We all know eros to the extent that we desire what we do not have. But, as the saying goes, love is blind. Philosophy is, for Socrates, erotic. The desire for wisdom. We all want for ourselves what is good, but we lack the wisdom to discern what is good. The Republic is an extended argument that attempts to persuade his listeners that justice is good for the soul and the city, that is, good for each of us and all of us.
In the Apology Socrates says that he does not know anything noble and good. (Apology 21d). And yet in the Symposium, a dialogue on eros, he claims:
(177d)
Hm. So Eros is innate to the soul, but Eros for the good is not innate to the soul because Eros is blind. Thank you, that helps!
I suppose that Plato was just lucky that his desire was for the good, and then he wanted to school everybody on what he saw was the right path for the betterment of the soul?
Eros for the good is innate. We all desire what is good. The problem is, we do not always know what that is.
Quoting dani
This is more complicated and controversial. Despite appearances, Plato does not think we can have knowledge of the good. I have laid out the argument here:
Knowledge of the Good
The question then is, how to pursue the good in the absence of knowledge of the good? In the Republic the philosophers are represented not as those who desires and pursues wisdom but as those who is wise. Those who knows the good and for this reason rule. And this for the good of the citizens.
I think we can think of our lives as being empty vases when we are conceived. This is the beginning of Ero's but at this stage, there are no words. It will be many years before a child has a vocabulary and there is no conceptual thinking without words. Not until age thirty is a person prepared enough to participate in philosophy and not all will be attracted to philosophical thinking.
Think of the cave. How old are those people chained to the wall? At this stage, education is about breaking those chains and freeing individuals. This is the opposite of education up to this point because the individual does not have the necessary critical thinking potential until 30 years of age.
Here is a good explanation.
Quoting Ariel Dillon
Religions tend to begin and stop with this primary education. No thinking required. Just trust in God and obey His word.
What are we to make of eros as "divine madness"? Rather than attempt to answer this question, I will make a few observations.
If philosophy is the erotic pursuit of wisdom, as Socrates claims in the Symposium, then it would seem there is a conflict between the common description of philosophy as reasoned inquiry and philosophy as divine madness.
Socrates claims:
(Phaedrus 244a)
He goes on to argue that it can be preferable to sound mindedness. We may find all of this inspiring, but can we trust it? Is he mad?
If the pursuit of wisdom is divine madness how should we proceed?
Toward the end of the dialogue Socrates says:
(277e)
Are Plato's dialogues the first that deserve to be taken seriously? What does it mean to take a written work seriously? The playfulness of Plato's works has often been noted. Can a work be both playful and serious?
Ending on a serious note: there are some who engage in philosophy who do not ascend to divine madness but fall to human madness.
It seems the idea of eros and the erotic are quite different in these dialogues to the carnal desire it is generally associated with in modern culture. Almost like an allegory.
I wonder if the 'madness' that Socrates refers to might be likened to ecstacy (ex-stasis, outside the normal state)?
May I be corrected if wrong, but Ive so far understood Ancient Greek eros to in essence be passionate desire for or attraction, not necessarily of a romantic/sexual kind. This is most typically lacking in storge, philia, and agape, but since it's part of romantic/sexual feelings, the latter will be classified as eros. Still, so interpreted, a desire for or attraction to wisdom, Truth, the Good, or some such ideal would thereby technically be eros (rather than agape, philia, or storge).
Not sure if this is in tune with what you're after, but the desire to become one with X, here spiritually addressed, would then be eros for X. X could then for example be God just as much as it could be a lover. In the context of this thread, the desire to become good (hence, to become one with the Good) would then be eros as well. As @Fooloso4 previously mentioned, although this desire is innate (everyone wants to be good at what they do, for one example), we don't quite know what the Good we're wanting to be in fact is.
If I'm way off in terms of what your asking for, maybe someone else could give a better answer.
---------
Edit: just realized, beauty, the aesthetic, too would here be classified as a form of eros and hence erotic in this sense. At least if by beauty we mean a pull or calling toward something not yet fully known that nevertheless beckons to us as a welcoming abode, or something to this effect.
Not at all, I think it's more that I haven't read the primary sources, so I'd better do that.
https://www.platonicfoundation.org/phaedrus/
https://www.platonicfoundation.org/symposium/
Quoting javra
In the Phaedrus Socrates speaks,
(265c)
We might expect him to say the opposite, beautiful boys are in need of a guardian against eros. How to sort this all out is the problem that Socrates immediately goes on to address. A major theme of the dialogue is speech, more specifically, beautiful speech. As the dialogue ends we see that whatever Socrates' attraction to Phaedrus might be, he speaks but does not act.
It is not simply a matter of separating speech and action but of their connection. Indeed, looking at the text that surrounds this we find what Socrates calls a "veritable game", one of joining and separating, bringing together and holding apart. So too, this is what love does.
Twice Socrates connects the just and beautiful and good (276b, 278a) At the end of the dialogue he prays:
(279b)
"Beloved Pan" is associated with eros in its carnal form. We might wonder whether Aphrodite is also present. She is the mother of the fourth kind of madness, love or eros. (242d, 265b) Aphrodite is known for her beauty. Pan is not. Socrates is known for his outward ugliness, and by his friends for his inner beauty.
I was aiming more at this conception rather than beauty as sexual/carnal attraction. If the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good are interwoven (if not in fact being the same thing), I'm thinking the motif of penetration commonly enough attributed to Pan of that age and specific culture could be interpreted spiritually using sexual intercourse as an allegory. As in being penetrated by the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good. All speculation, of course. This could however relate to:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)#Worship
Here assuming Hellenism to be in significant ways derivative of Plato's writings.
Still, the connection between the three ideals/forms mentioned - and a person's possible attraction, hence eros, toward this nexus - is where my main interests personally are.
:grin: I could see how that could be allegorically stated. :up: Still, technically, I will argue that sociopaths too want to be good at what they do, and so are in their own way innately attracted to the good, even though their conception of it might be easily considered perverse.
Something of the same applies to the Symposium: after a profound debate on the nature of eros-love, the whole thing ends in confusion, a great deal of wine-drinking and some participants forgetting altogether what was discussed :)
To me the 'erotic' emphasis is entwined in the Symposium with female imagery, the desire to beget, and pregnancy. These features make it startling: Socrates does not quote himself on love, he develops a dialogue-within-a-dialogue in which the woman Diotima explains love's nature to him, and thence, through him, to his male companions. So the centrality of eros, even where it focuses initially on male-to-male desire (as apparently some of the Greek verbs do, in a way that's disguised by English translation), is built on eros as an expression of a craving to beget - to become pregnant with knowledge of the good and the beautiful. Personally I really like the image of pregnancy-with-the-good, which seems to segue from being a metaphor to a kind of true state, though there's lots of scholarly debate about the image.
The Forms are said to each be one and separate, but Plato often tread the just, the beautiful, and the good together.
The Greek term kalos is translated as beautiful, or noble, and sometimes good. We should not conclude, however, that Plato was unaware of the problematic aspect of beauty as attraction. As with the desire for the good, attraction plays a role that should not be overlooked or disregarded.
In Melville's Moby Dick Ishmael asks:
Good point, but to the end and having drank copiously, Socrates appears to remain sober. The dialogue ends:
Quoting mcdoodle
In the Theaetetus Socrates calls himself a midwife to men but who is himself unable to give birth. (150 b-c)
Psychopaths, at least, are often described as 'soul-less' for the total inability to empathize.
I don't disagree, though you're saying that "good" is subjective thus essentially anyone's chosen behavior can be labeled "good" if you equate intentionality with seeking to do "good".
I can live with your description if you can live with a "soul" being a reflection of one's behavior/outlook (as opposed to an innate entity that all humans possess).
I'll honestly say "yes" and "no" (at the same time but in different ways). But will keep it at that for now.
Ah I see. So Eros for the good is innate, but people may be thwarted in their efforts to get to the good because they don't know what it is. They may end up pursuing pleasure, for example, thinking that it is the good. So that's where Plato's city-state would come in, educating its citizens on what the good is.
However, the good itself can never be fully grasped because it is not only a "form," in the realm of being, but something beyond forms that actually informs all forms themselves, too.
So the human Eros for the good, even if appropriately applied, would never be able to reach the true and full concept of the good (whatever that may be.)
Don't be shy, what do you think?
Thus the soul in your context, disappears when we die, right?
Already stated.
Think of it this way, the same can be generally applied to an innate attraction to justice. What is just is in one way subjective to individual judgments in concrete particular contexts while, in another maybe far more important way, can all the same be perfectly determinate in the sense of being universally fixed, this as something like "fairness in given and take".
Not an easy topic to address though. So I'll be shy from here on out. :smile:
Plato's city-state in the Republic is a city made in speech. It has never existed in practice and was never intended to. It is created in order to see justice in the soul writ large. The underlying premise being that a just soul is like a just city. We might wonder why he did not simply point to an existing city as an exemplar. The somewhat troubling answer is that no city is truly just.
If then there is a just soul it is not the result of the city's education.
The cave is "an image of our nature in its education and want of education". (Republic 514a) Education in the cave is at best a likeness or image of the truth. The truth can only be found when one is able to escape the cave, that is, when one is able to escape one's education in the city. The philosophers, who have escaped the cave, are compelled to return in order to rule.
An important question arises. Do they transform the cave or is it still illuminated by the light of the fire? As far as I can see, the cave/city remains in the realm of opinion.
Quoting dani
All of this is, in my opinion, Plato's philosophical poetry, intended to replace the teachings of the traditional poets. In the Republic it is not simply that poetry is banned along with the traditional poets, they are replaced by Plato's own images of the just, beautiful, and good.
I see a single life as part of an unfolding of a continuum which neither begins at birth nor ends at death, although the metaphysics are difficult to fathom.
In the mythological explanation provided by Diotima in Plato's Symposium, Eros is the child of very different parents:
Quoting Plato, Symposium, 203b
What is innate is the condition of constantly moving between receiving the benefits of Resource and undergoing the desperation of Poverty. This ever-shifting ground shows us that the urgency of desire is not only a movement toward fulfillment but is a form of life.
What is the highest good for the lover requires this urgency in order to come to life.
If I had written like this during my academic non-philosophy essay days, I would get a markdown -- in fact, anyone would have gotten a markdown. Those teachers did not know how the writer's mind works.
This is interesting when looking at how Plato is working with Diotima's account.
In the dialogue of Symposium, Socrates is supposed to give his explanation for what eros is but recounts a dialogue instead. This dialogue presents a friendly conversation between the philosopher and the poet in stark contrast to others Plato has written, such as the Republic, as noted by Fooloso4:
Quoting Fooloso4
Within the Symposium, I see a likeness between Diotima's:
and the sober exit of Socrates from the gathering:
Quoting 223d
The tension between being homeless and also a keeper of a house reminds me of Odysseus. The wiliness Diotima observes in the Lover is exemplified by the hero on his journey home. But Socrates is travelling in a different way.
In this symposium speeches on love take the place of drinking since several participants have hangovers. Two highly regarded poets speak, the tragic poet Agathon, in whose house this party takes place, and the comic poet Aristophanes, who in his play The Clouds satirizes Socrates and philosophy. Just as Socrates could out drink them all, he demonstrates that he could give a better speech on love then them all. With regard to both wine and love, he suffers the least adverse effects.
Just as [correction: Plato] never speaks in his own name in the dialogues, Socrates does not speak in his own name but rather recounts in his own words those of an unknown, possibly fictitious, woman Diotima on matters of love and wisdom.
I meant what I quoted. Your writing.
There are varying interpretations on Plato, but my take would be that desire of the good is in everyone. However, this desire is often corrupted or overrun in various ways.
There are two problems Plato diagnoses. First, we can be internally disordered, at war with ourselves, our actions driven by desire, instinct, and circumstances. When we do not understand why we are acting, we are effects of other causes, and thus not fully self-determining, and not fully "real" as ourselves. Even if we love the good, we do not pursue it in this disordered state. Second, we can fail to know what is truly Good, and be led into evil by ignorance.
Plato describes the soul has having multiple parts in the Republic. Only the intellect is capable of unifying the soul, ordering the desires, and allowing us to be more self-determining and thus freer. Why is this? Because the intellect is always going beyond itself. In wanting to learn the truth, we go beyond our current beliefs, transcending our current selves and reaching outwards. In this mode, we are not defined by externalities, but rather incorporate them into ourselves.
In the Republic, Plato says that, in general, people want "what is really good" not just "what appears to be good at the moment." If we want X and find out that we were mistaken about X, that in light of the truth, Y is better, we will want Y.
Arguably, Plato is begging the question here. Obviously if we think something is "better" we prefer it. But I don't think this is the case, because by "better" he means "more morally good," or "more true," not just "preferred." Yet Plato does not think we always choose the good. Disordered desire and instinct can make us act in favor of the less good. His point was only that the intellect always has a desire to "know what is truly good and really true" and that this transcendent element of the intellect is what makes it fit to have authority over the other parts of the soul.
The wicked normally don't think "I am evil." E.g., Hitler did not see himself as a monster. Thus, evil is often born of an ignorance of what is truly good. People can have a love for "the Good" and still fail to know what the good truly is, resulting in evil actions. The other way people end up acting evilly is that they are disordered. They do what they think is bad because desire rules over them; intellect is not unifying the person, but rather they are divided against themselves.
Love is important here because love is also transcendent. For Plato, what we love in others is the Good in them. Love is based in our desire to be unified with the Good. In this, it is also transcendent. The ideal state is one of seeking knowledge, in love, because only in this state are we continually going beyond our current beliefs and desires, transcending them as we reach out for the Good. When one hates something, one is defined by that relation. But love is a broadening of identity.
Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is a summary of this I really like. It is sort of poorly named, because it isn't so much about what we generally call "mysticism", as it is about Plato (and to a lesser extent Hegel)'s conception of morality and freedom (although I think Wallace might be reading a bit of the later Platonist theologians back into Plato.)
I was reluctant to address your observation about my writing; The idea that it might be better than it appears is encouraging. Is the deficiency a penchant for merely making connections between texts rather than explicating a thesis?
One could read Socrates hanging back from the party to commune with his thoughts at the beginning of the Symposium as a bout of "divine madness." He is literally 'standing outside' on a porch such as Diotima describes the homeless might be found to sleep upon.
That image also compares one kind of 'absorption' with the wine that overwhelms the others.
I wasn't talking about a deficiency. But yes, it is better than it appears to you.
Here's the full paragraph:
Quoting Paine
Truly, this, to me, is written by a writer, not by someone trying to submit an essay for a mark after having studied the recommended tone and population limit of undefined terminology and nouns squeezed within a paragraph, let alone a single sentence.
Keep writing.
Sorry to go off-topic.