Philosophy of Love in the Past, Present, and Future

André Grahle, Natasha McKeever, Joe Saunders, André Grahle, Natasha McKeever, Joe Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367444211
• eBook ISBN: 9781000537512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume features original essays on the philosophy of love. The essays are organized thematically around the past, present, and future of philosophical thinking about love.

In Part I, the contributors explore what we can learn from the history of philosophical thinking about love. The chapters cover Ancient Greek thinkers, namely Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kierkegaard's critique of preferential love and Erich Fromm's mystic interpretation of sexual relations. Part II covers current conceptions and practices of love. These chapters explore how love changes over time, the process of falling in love, the erotic dimension of romantic love, and a new interpretation of grand-parental love. Finally, Part III looks at the future of love. These chapters address technological developments related to love, such as algorithm-driven dating apps and robotic companions, as well as the potential of polyamory as a future romantic ideal.

This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in moral philosophy and social and political philosophy who are working on issues related to the philosophy of love.

Part I

Past

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014331-2

1 Love and Death in Plato’s Symposium

Ginger Tate Clausen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014331-3

Introduction

Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Symposium (201d–212c) delineates a fascinating yet notoriously contentious account of love (erôs). On that account, erotic love is a desire to make beautiful things one’s own, and lovers are drawn to what they perceive to be beautiful. The pursuit of beauty is not aimless, however—on Plato’s view, erôs impels lovers along a path which begins with appreciating a single beautiful body and ends in appreciating the form of beauty itself. The form of beauty is an ethical ideal—it represents “the fine” (kalon) conceived both ethically and aesthetically. Platonic love has thus been charged with reducing the value of the beloved to a single property, and thereby exposing itself to traditional objections levelled against the so-called Quality View of love. Furthermore, due to its emphasis on the connection between the pursuit of beauty, ethical progress, and knowledge, Platonic love might appear to be excessively idealized and intellectualized.

I develop a neo-Platonic account of erotic love which answers these concerns. A central notion of the account is that a lover opens themselves to being changed by a person whose particular beauty evokes an uncanny sense of eternity and permanence. The account draws from an interpretation of Socrates’ speech in the Symposium which emphasizes its descriptive and thematic similarity to Socrates’ characterization of the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo. In the Phaedo, Socrates proclaims that the aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death (Phaedo, 62c9–e7). As María Angélica Fierro (2001) argues, there are numerous parallels between Socrates’ description of the “correct” way of loving in the Symposium and his account of the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo. Both passages characterize the proper pursuit of an exalted object by contrast to lesser pursuits of sublunary objects. The exalted objects in both cases are Forms, and both passages describe the pursuit of acquaintance with the Forms as the path to true immortality. Thus, while the Phaedo focuses explicitly on the fact that we must die in order to achieve unfettered access to the Forms, since the Symposium describes the same trajectory, Platonic love can be characterized as involving a desire for death.

The idea that erôs and the desire for death are meaningfully bound and fundamental to human motivation is one of the central tenets of early psychoanalytic theory. I draw connections between Plato’s Symposium and the work of psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, who began her career as a patient of Carl Jung before eventually attaining her doctorate and developing professional relationships with both Jung and Freud, and whose early work on erôs and the death drive predated and quite likely influenced the latter theorists’ discussions of the relationship between these forces.¹ I draw from Spielrein’s work in part to show the enduring resonance of Plato’s account, but also because elements of her discussion of erotic love offer materials for a version of Plato’s view which, I argue, coheres with Plato’s own account but which is less vulnerable to objections that may be levelled against that account, such as that it is overly moralistic, intellectualized, elitist, and hierarchical. To this end, the chapter concludes with a discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread—a moving portrayal of the connection between love and death whose central relationship, I argue, personifies a non-intellectualized Platonic erôs.

I begin, though, by examining the Symposium and its connection to Phaedo in order to fill out the details of Plato’s account of love. In both dialogues, Socrates explicitly characterizes the views he presents as having fundamentally structured his life. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues—to the shock of his friends—that every man who partakes in philosophy should be willing to seek death (Phaedo, 61d). After all, Socrates explains, death consists in the separation of the soul from the body, and the philosopher spends his life trying to shed the epistemological burdens of embodiment in order to attain knowledge of the truths that must be apprehended by the intellect alone, i.e., the nature of truth, beauty, and goodness (Phaedo, 64c–67c). Thus, “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (Phaedo, 64a) by “purifying” (Phaedo, 67c) their minds of sublunary influences and thus becoming optimally poised to receive knowledge of the forms after death.

In the Symposium, Socrates praises erôs by reporting an account of love conveyed to him by the priestess Diotima. He claims to have been persuaded by Diotima’s account and to have striven to live his life in honour of it (Symposium, 212c). Indeed, the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima reported early in Socrates’ speech shows that he and Diotima conceive of erôs not narrowly as a drive to pursue interpersonal entanglements, but rather as the fundamental desire that structures all human attempts to achieve what is (perceived to be) good or meaningful (Symposium, 205c; 208d). Thus, when Socrates states that he attempts to live his life in honour of these rites of love, we should understand him to mean not just the narrowly erotic aspects of his life, but rather his life as a whole.

Indeed, it is the diligence Socrates shows in living as a lover in Diotima’s sense that distinguishes him from his contemporaries and makes him such a compelling and divisive figure. As Diotima states in Symposium (202a–204c), love is “between” beauty and ugliness; wisdom and ignorance, and, as such, the lover strives for beauty and knowledge but does not yet possess them. If he were to possess them enduringly, he would be not a lover but something unrealizable by creatures in a constant state of change—something closer to a God.² This description of the ontology of the lover comports with Socrates’ account in the Apology of how he grappled with the Oracle at Delphi’s declaration that there is no man wiser than Socrates (Apology, 20c–24e). What makes Socrates the wisest man, he ultimately came to understand, is that, unlike others, he is aware of the extent of his own ignorance. Indeed, this awareness itself results from being a lover of wisdom—he is driven to seek knowledge in dialogue with others, and by pursuing knowledge so single-mindedly and sincerely becomes well-acquainted the limits of his own understanding. Even after a lifetime of seeking to understand what is true, he doesn’t actually know what awaits him after death; he only has “good hope” (Phaedo, 63c) that the views he has come to accept in the course of a lifetime of knowledge-seeking will turn out to be true—that is, that he will have prepared himself to the point that, by dying, he will finally be able to, as Diotima describes the last stage of the lover’s ascent in (Symposium, 212a) “[look] at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen”, since “if any human being could become immortal, it would be [the one who has been initiated into these rites of love]”.

Plato and Spielrein on Love and Change

The lover, on Plato’s account, is in an in-between state, and is constantly being changed by his pursuit of something he perceives to be beautiful but which in one way or another eludes his grasp.³ Diotima’s account depicts this change as an ascent—a kind of intellectual and moral progression that will ultimately position the lover to be initiated into the “final and highest mystery”, which, as I have argued by reference to the Phaedo, we can plausibly understand to entail bodily death and spiritual immortality. The psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between love and death to which I now turn describe erôs in somewhat less rarefied terms. Indeed, Freud offers a flattened interpretation of the Symposium’s conception of erôs in a letter to Albert Einstein written in 1932, the following passage from which summarizes the account of the relationship between erôs and the death-drive he also advances in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id, and Civilization and its Discontents.⁴

According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite we call ‘erotic,’ (exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word ‘Erôs’ in his Symposium) or ‘sexual,’ with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of ‘sexuality’—and those which seek to destroy and kill, which we group together as the aggressive and destructive instinct. As you see, this is in fact no more than a theoretical classification of the universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge.

(Freud and Schupper 1964, p. 8)

Freud here and in other works describes erôs and thanatos (the death-drive; what he here calls the “destructive instinct”) as opposing forces. Erôs is the desire to “combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities”, (Freud and Schupper 1964, p.8) and the death drive, which seeks to “dissolve these combinations and destroy the structure to which they have given rise” (Freud and Schupper 1964, p.9). Despite claiming an affinity with Plato’s conception of erôs, Freud’s account of the concept is structurally distinct from the conception of erôs analysed in Socrates’ Symposium speech. Freud conceives of erôs as a desire to preserve and unite, but whose efforts, as he describes in Civilization and its Discontents, are constantly under threat from the death-drive, i.e. “man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each” (Freud and Schupper 1964, p.7) which opposes the program of civilization and cooperation for the sake of some common good that erôs compels us to pursue. Thus, Freud depicts erôs and the death-drive as opposing forces in constant struggle; what erôs drives us to build, the death-drive compels us to destroy; and the history of human civilization essentially comes down to these cycles of creation and destruction.

Plato’s erôs, on the other hand, is not the sort of thing that even admits of an opposing force; nobody who has attained the object of love would be motivated to return to their previous condition, or to destroy what they have built. This is in part because, on Plato’s account, the lover becomes changed by the process of pursuing what they love, and what they change into is somebody who values what is truly valuable. As such, their motivations become more firmly guided by the Beautiful and they won’t have the impulse to move further from the Beautiful and certainly not to destroy it; indeed, to do so they would have to destroy the person they have become.

Self-destruction is not antithetical to erotic love, however, whether or not it meets the Platonic ideal. Indeed, Sabina Spielrein’s fascinating essay “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” proposes an account of the relationship between love and self-destruction which posits a necessary connection between these phenomena, and which resonates with the account offered in the Symposium as I’ve interpreted it through the lens of the Phaedo. The project she sets herself in the essay is to explain why the erotic drive harbours negative feelings like anxiety and disgust, in addition to the inherently anticipated positive feelings one can expect from acting in line with the drive. Building on analyses of neurotic patients and examples from mythology (along with some evidentiarily questionable references to the ontology of reproductive biology), Spielrein develops a theory on which the erotic drive inherently involves an impulse to both self-destruction and to coming into being as something new, the latter of which can only come in on the heels of the former. Thus, Spielrein’s analysis accords with the Platonic idea that fulfilment of the erotic drive entails being changed by the thing that you love. Furthermore, on Spielrein’s view, because being changed entails the destruction of one’s former self, the erotic drive is often accompanied by fantasies of death—in a striking example she describes one patient who describes death as “a handsome man”, and posits that “for a normal young woman the image of a burial is blissful since she imagines herself vanishing in the beloved” (Spielrein 1994, pp. 166–7).

Beauty and the Object of Love: Responding to Critiques of Plato’s Account

I draw these parallels between Diotima’s and Spielrein’s analyses of erotic love in part to bolster my position that Diotima’s account is not as elitist, moralistic or overly intellectualized as it may seem. To further defend that position it will prove useful to examine the different lenses through which Socrates’ speech in the Symposium analyses love. From the start of the speech to 210a, the subject of analysis is the nature of love. Love is analysed as a desire, which wants and therefore lacks its object—in this case, the beautiful/good. A lover wants not only to possess what is beautiful but to keep it, and so love is analysed as a desire to make the good/beautiful one’s own forever. At 206b, a new aspect of love’s nature is examined; we move from a discussion of love’s object to a discussion of what a lover characteristically does, which, on Diotima’s account, is seek to reproduce in beauty. Here we see Diotima divide people into distinct kinds (i.e. those who are “pregnant in body” and those who are “pregnant in soul”) and suggest that the one who pursues love “correctly” i.e. the way which becomes progressively more intellectual/philosophical, has the best chance at achieving immortal possession of the good, i.e. the best chance at fulfilling the constitutive desire of erôs.

Dividing lovers into a hierarchy and suggesting that only the set of lovers more draw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Past
• PART II: Present
• PART III: Future
• About the Contributors
• Index