Abstract
In the so-called “erotic dialogues”, especially the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato explained why erotic desire can play an epistemic function, establishing a strong connection between erotic desire and beauty, “the most clearly visible and the most loved” (Phaedr. 250e1) among the Ideas. Taking the erotic dialogues as a background, in this paper I elucidate Plato’s explanation in another context, the one of the Phaedo (72e3-77a5), for discussing the epistemic function of erotic desire in relation to the deficiency argument and the affinity argument. My claim is that the erotic desire of the philosopher is activated by the recognition of traces of the Ideas as something that the material world lacks and that, nevertheless, his soul is familiar with. This desire for the Ideas triggers the process of recollection, and thus erotic desire acquires a decisive role in the acquisition of knowledge in the Phaedo. In the final section of the paper, I highlight the contemporary relevance of Plato’s epistemology of erotic desire.
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Notes
On what has been called “Plato’s erotic philosophy” see the analysis of four erotic dialogues (the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Lysis, and Alcibiades I) by Belfiore 2012, but also some of the new books that have been dedicated in particular to the Symposium in the last few years, among them Sheffield 2009, Tulli and Erler 2016, Destrée and Giannopoulou 2017.
With “erotic desire” I am explicitly referring to erôs (ἔρως). The meaning of erotic desire is different from the general meaning of desire, epithymia (ἐπιθυμία), as wanting to get what one lacks, since it is characterised as a specific desire for beauty (Plato, Symp. 200 b-e). For the specificity of erotic desire, see Halperin (2017).
Indeed the visual knowledge metaphor is a literary topos at least from Heraclitus, and it can be found throughout our philosophical history. For an examination of the preliminary stage of the philosophical concept formation, see Blumenberg 1993.
I am following the interpretation, that has now become classic, for which the theorein – the higher form of knowledge as contemplation – is the spiritual eyes’ view of the Ideas. “Qui dit theoria dit vue. Cette vue a pour objet l’Intelligible, le noeton. Elle exige donc un organe approprié qui appréhende cet objet. L’idée même de contemplation inclut en son essence un oeil spirituel, un nous”, Festugière 1967: 105. For the semantic horizon of cognition as sight, cf. Napolitano Valditara 1994.
See also Resp. 533d and Soph. 254a.
For the noeton as the proper object of the nous, see the image of the line in Plato, Resp. VI, 509e-511d.
“And what about fine, and good? [...] Well, have you ever seen anything like that with your eyes? Certainly not. And do you get a hold on them through any of the other senses that work through the body? I’m talking here about everything – for example about size, health, strength; in a world, about the essence of these and all the other things, what each of them actually is: are they observed at their truest through the body, or is it rather like this, that whichever of us puts himself in a position to reflect the most, and the most accurately, on each object of investigation, by itself, he’ll be the one who comes closest to an understanding of each of them? Absolutely” (Plat., Phaed. 65d8-65e5)
We can find references to good memory as an attribute of the philosopher in many other dialogues. See Chappell 2017 for references and discussion especially concerning the theory of recollection.
Although the two dialogues are strictly connected, not only thematically but also with an inter-textual reference (Phaed. 73a-b).
“If the things we’re always talking about really exist – something that’s beautiful by itself, something that’s good by itself, in short all the things of that kind that there are; if we refer their counterparts, from our acts of perceiving, to them, rediscovering a knowledge that was there before and so was ours already; and if we really do compare the things we perceive to those others, then it must follow that just as the beautiful, the good, and so on exist, so does our soul, even before we’ve been born, and they don’t exist, all of this argument of ours will have been in vain? Is that how it is, namely that an equal degree of necessity attaches to the two claims – both that those other things exist, and that our souls do, before our birth as well as after it?” (Plato, Phaedo 76d8-e7).
See also 82d-83b where Socrates describes how philosophy persuades the philosophers to not inquire using the senses.
Awakening, in conjunction with conversion, is the main aim of philosophical education. See Plato, Resp. 532b6-d1.
The paradox could be summarized in this way: 1. For any x, one either knows, or does not know, x. 2. If one knows x, one cannot inquire into x. 3. If one does not know x, one cannot inquire into x. 4. Therefore, whether or not one knows x, one cannot inquire into x.
For an analysis of this example see Sedley 2007.
As it has been stressed by Gordon (2012, p. 187), the objects mentioned in the example are not neutral, but a common emotive content characterises them, the erotic one: the lyre and the cloak of the beloved (73d5–9), and later on the painting of a horse (73e5–7) and of Simmias that makes one remember his friend Cebes (73e6–7). Gordon has underlined that the horse is a phallic symbol in the Attic comedy, and I want to add that the lyre may refer to lyric poetry, which is an expression of feelings of love and yearning.
“Whereas if we get our knowledge before we are born but lose it on being born, and then later through the use of our perceptions (ταῖς αἰσθήσεσι) we get back those pieces of knowledge that we had at some previous time, what we call learning (μανθάνειν) would be a matter of getting back knowledge (ἐπιστήμην ἀναλαμβάνειν) that was ours anyway; and we’d surely be correct if we called that recollection (ἀναμιμνῄσκεσθαι)?” (Phaed. 75e2–7)
Arguably this claim is suitable for the Phaedo and also for the previous characterisation of learning as anamnesis in the Meno (81b–84b) and the Phaedrus (249b–d). However, it is not for the Philebus (34a–c), where it is claimed that anamnesis (which is different from memory, mneme) occurs in the soul by itself when the soul remembers the sensations that she felt with the body in the past. See Brisson 2008. I think that the thesis coming from the Philebus is very convenient for understanding that Plato’s theory of recollection is not reducible to an empiricist theory, and it is not incompatible with what I am arguing here. The compatibility has been built by Plato himself, connecting his epistemological version of the theory of recollection with its metaphysical implications.
This functional role performed by the Idea (stressed by the neo-Kantian interpretation of Plato’s epistemology) is rooted in the metaphysical claim for which Ideas exist before perception, in the realm of the separated souls. This metaphysical claim is the foundation of the theory of recollection but in the Phaedo is envisaged as a hypothesis that must be demonstrated (92 d6–7).
In the etymologies of the Cratylus (415 a-b sg) to kàlon, the beautiful, derives from kaléin, calling.
The Ideas are said to be grasped by the soul itself by itself whn, separated from the body (Phaed. 64c), and “using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself” (Phaed. 66 a1–3).
On the philomathes, lover of learning, and philosophos, lover of wisdom, see Resp. IX, 581b9.
The classical reference, within the last century of scholarship, to what has been called “the platonic theory of love” is Robin [1908] 1964. This account, that found in the Diotima’s speech its primary textual evidence, has also be challenged by those accounts that want to understand erotic desire from the perspective of the relationship between Socrates and his lovers (notably Vlastos 1973). Please see Renaut 2017 for a cogent summary of both the accounts and a discussion of the sexual dimension of love for the understanding of Plato’s erôs.
A quite wide debate arises on the meaning of sublimation in Plato’s account of erotic desire, mostly due to Nietzsche’s criticism and to the development of Freudian psychoanalysis. Please see Kahn (1987) for a discussion of the key platonic passages on desire that can bring to this interpretation (that the author although does not support).
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This work was supported by the EU, Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, Horizon 2020 under Grant 655143 — EMOTIONS FIRST at the University of Edinburgh.
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Candiotto, L. The Divine Feeling: the Epistemic Function of Erotic Desire in Plato’s Theory of Recollection. Philosophia 48, 445–462 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00108-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00108-1