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Love in Plato and Plotinus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

Raoul Mortley
Raoul Mortley*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
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Extract

Our greatest blessings come to us through madness, Plato tells us in Phaedrus 244 A, and his examination of this particular form of madness has had a commanding influence in the history of Western philosophy and literature. The Symposium, which is the major concern of this paper, is one of Plato’s most ironic and yet most serious dialogues and has been repeatedly reinterpreted and repeatedly used as a source of inspiration and ideas from ancient times up until the 20th century. Some of its key phrases are echoed by the neo-Platonists, and its combination of the erotic and the mystical provided a fertile soil for the development of the Christian idea of love, despite the existence of a rival notion of love within Christianity, designated by the term agape. The classic attempt to distinguish between Christian and Platonic love was made by Nygren in his book, Eros and Agape, and this author draws a distinction between the two with glaring simplicity. Agape is (on this view) the quality of caritas, of feeling that bond with one’s fellow man which causes one to attend to his needs and wants, whilst eros is the more self-centred drive for personal fulfilment. The Patristic writers did not feel the difference between the two to be as decisive as that outlined by Nygren, and as John Rist notes in his Eros and Psyche, Origen was one Christian writer who failed to observe the sharpness of the distinction between them. It is not my intention however to dwell on this distinction, since the original Christian notion of love is more a matter of behavioural than philosophical or literary significance. However the debate is instructive since it tends to produce caricatures on both sides, with Christian love losing its mystical aspect, and Platonic love losing the emphasis on self-transcendence. In fact it is arguable that Platonic love is more concerned with need and lack, than it is with self-indulgence and with wallowing in some romantic vision, and this paper will argue that the idea of love as ‘lack’ is a most important, yet often overlooked ingredient, in the account of love which is given by Plato and Plotinus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 14 , 1980 , pp. 45 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1980

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References

1 This paper was originally delivered to the AULLA congress at the University of Newcastle (NSW) in February 1980. It owes something to the subsequent discussion.

2 Toronto 1964, 204–7. See also Spanneut, M., ‘L’amour de Héllenisme au Christianisme’, in Mélanges de Science Religieuse 20 (1963), 5–19.Google Scholar

3 Though not by Kosman, L.A., ‘Platonic Love’, in Facets of Plato’s Philosophy, ed.Google ScholarWerkmeister, W.H. (Assen 1976) [Phronesis, suppl. vol. 2].Google Scholar

4 K.J. Dover has some incisive remarks about this inhis recent edition of The Symposium (Cambridge 1980), but taken from a different perspective: ‘The Greeks generally agreed, however, in treating the difference between eros and ordinary sexual desire as quantitative…’ (p. 2). See also his ‘Eros and Nomos’, BICS 11 (1964), 31–42.

5 Platonic Studies (Princeton 1973), 39.

6 132 D.

7 Platonic Love (London 1963), 34.

8 Standard Edition, ed. J. Strachey, 18. 57-8.

9 See Hippolyte, Jean, Studies in Marx and Hegel, 97 ff.;Google ScholarHook, Sidney, From Hegel to Marx, 31 ff.Google Scholar

10 The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, J., (New York1967), 238.Google Scholar

11 Op. cit. 229.

12 Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1. 386, 2. 1–2, 36, 116–7.

13 Warner’s, Martin thoughtful article (Philosophical Quarterly 29 [1979], 331)Google Scholar puts it like this: ‘It is not so much, says Diotima, that we seek our other half just because it was once part of us, after all we do not wish to be reunited with a diseased limb we have had amputated; we only wish to be united with thatwhich we perceive to be good.’ However I think it worth stressing that Diotima does notexclude the idea of a lack-engendered craving: she differs only on the object of the craving. She preserves the idea of lack.

14 It was to become an influential view: Philo, for example, refers at. De Opificio 152 to love fitting together the divided halves ‘of a single living creature, as it were’.

15 See Buchner, H., Eros und Sein (Bonn1965), 55–95 on the notion of ‘metaxy’.Google Scholar

16 Plato. An Introduction (New York 1958), 56. However see also Dillon's, John careful exposition (Agon 3 [1969], 29–44) of Plotinus’ opinions on love, and of how they cast light on major issues in his philosophy.Google Scholar

17 Desire will irradiate ceaselessly, unless it encounters Limit.Hegel, one notes, has his own Horos, or conception of limit, as applied to the desire of the bondsman in contrast to that of his master. (See Sidney Hook, op. cit. 69, on the meaning of die Grenze in Hegel’s Logic.)

18 Eros in this guise is comparable to the Sophia of gnostic myth: she is a female principle, characterized by unresolved passion (pathos). She lacks shape and form, like Plotinus’ eros, and Ptolemaeus says that she was like an ‘abortion’ (ἒ κτρωμα). She strains after that which she does not possess, and eventually Christ sends Horos to her, that is Limit personified, and she obtains some relief (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.4. 1; see also Hippolytus, Refutatio 6. 30. 6). Is Sophia a feminized version of the male Eros of orthodox Platonism?