The Drama Erotic: Plato
Photo by Andrea Contieri on Unsplash
This is the first part of a two-part series on the subject of Eros and how it is apprehended in Platonic philosophy and Benedict XVI’s theology. The hope of this series is to highlight the dramatic dimensions of Eros as the love of attraction.
In the seminary, I teach some philosophy as well as theology, and the course that I teach this semester is called “Ethics and the Family”. This week, we looked at the subject of Eros - the love of attraction - as one of the four loves catalogued by CS Lewis in his Four Loves.
What I sought to do in this class is to go beyond the the simplistic equation of Eros with what passes today for the erotic, that is a self indulgence in sensual pleasure. This was necessary, I said, because it feeds a puritan drive to throw out the erotic as inherently sinful. To the contrary, I taught that Eros is a necessary love to have to be properly human, and indeed, properly Christian. For Eros properly conceived, is what Plato calls in his Phaedrus, “the madness of the gods”. For Plato, the erotic is a necessary part of one’s self-transcendence.
To elaborate on this, we read together a passage from Plato’s Symposium, and focused on Socrates’ engagement with Diotima of Mantinea. Diotima is an pivotal figure in our consideration of Eros, for she is the one responsible for tying the erotic with the beautiful. Indeed, Diotima goes as far as to say that Eros, the attraction to beautiful things, is what begets on a beautiful thing.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves, before making this statement, Diotima makes a point with Socrates that touches upon the point made in the Phaedrus, namely that Eros puts us in touch with the transcendent. Before she gets to her point on beauty, Diotima says to Socrates:
Diotima: Then we may state unreservedly that men love the good?
Socrates: Yes
Diotima: Well now, must we not extend it to this, that they love the good to be theirs?
Socrates: We must
Diotima: And do they love it to be not merely theirs but theirs always?
Socrates: Include that also.
Diotima: Briefly then, love loves the good to be one's own for ever
What is important to note here is that the erotic is but a manifestation of a desire for that transcendent category that Plato calls “The Good”. In other words, before erotic attraction to the beautiful is about base self-indulgence, it is a pursuit of something transcendent. The analogy for this transcendence is subtly and beautifully borne out in the conversation when Diotima notes that the pursuit of the good is also coupled with the desire for “the good to be one’s own for ever”, that is for eternity.
Attraction to the beautiful, I added in the class, is the first step towards transcendence because a beautiful thing is what cracks open a heart that might otherwise remain closed in upon itself. Furthermore, in being attracted to a beautiful thing, the heart is recognising the transcendental of Beauty and is drawn towards it. There is a moving out of one’s self, an ecstasy (derived from the Greek ekstasis, or standing out of oneself), and Plato suggests that this moving out of self puts the person on the path towards self-transcendence his or her own transformation and perfection to a higher being. For it is only in this self-transcendence that a person can be put in a position to possess that which is beautiful forever.
And it is precisely at this point that the drama turns in a tragic direction.
Diotima says elsewhere that one is not simply erotically attracted to Beauty per se. Instead, she says that one can only be attracted to Beauty insofar as they are attracted to beautiful things, and so the good and beautiful can only be one’s own forever insofar as the beautiful thing or person forever. Only things and persons do not live forever. To put the tragedy briefly, the very moment that one can have that which lasts forever is the moment that one comes to possess that which cannot last forever.
There is also a sinister turn to the drama to consider.
In class, I made a note that in the moment of erotic ecstasy, a person who is attracted by beauty does not think of oneself. It is precisely this taking leave of oneself that a person can be in a position to fulfill his or her desire to possess the good forever. Possession, however, is a fork in the road, because possession is very often for oneself. In the act of possessing, one curves in to oneself, to borrow Augustine’s definition of sin. Just when a person takes leave of him- or herself to pursue the beautiful thing, the act of possessing that beautiful thing can cause the pursuer to turn back on him- or herself. This turning back on oneself disrupts the process of self-transcendence, as the act of possessing causes the person’s desires to either stop at the physical and go no further, and stop at one’s base desires and no further. Again, tragically, the natural process of Eros: the desire to transcend oneself by possessing forever that which is attractive risks being struck down in the very act of possession.
I say “risks”, rather than “must”, for that might suggest that we can go no further than this closed loop of erotic tragedy. We will look at the reopening of this closed loop in the next post.
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