6 - Love among the philosophers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2010
Summary
The place of beauty
Socrates' declared purpose in telling his eschatological myth, as we have just seen, is to make a place for the passion of love – hence for the contingency of physical beauty – in the philosophic life. But it is important to see that he does not, as it were, clear a space for it on a neglected shelf in philosophy's larder; rather, he portrays the life of philosophic lovers as the fullest realisation – or at the very least as one of the fullest realisations – of the philosophic life in general. Thus we recall that he described the highest of the nine ranks of life as that of ‘a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and a lover’ (248d3–4) – a life he subsequently glosses as that of ‘one who has practised philosophy without guile, or combined his love for a boy with the practice of philosophy’ (249a1–2). And at the close of the speech he asserts that his exemplary pair of philosophic lovers have gained a good ‘than which neither human moderation nor divine madness can furnish a greater for mankind’ (256b5–6). In chapter four I indicated that in his palinode, by contrast with the speeches of the non-lovers, Socrates achieves an integrated account of the conflicting impulses in the soul, learning from and harmonising all its voices. That psychic harmony should be the philosophic ideal comes as no surprise to any reader of the Republic; yet all the same, the integration is here achieved within the limits of a purely erotic context.
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- Listening to the CicadasA Study of Plato's Phaedrus, pp. 140 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987