In what follows, I will argue that the
most important lesson Diotima teaches us about love is the idea that all love
is sexual, but not in the way we think. To do so, I will identify what I think
to be the relevant ideas presented by Diotima and argue for their contemporary
significance by showing the truth in them.
The conceptual web
in which we find love strikes us as decidedly different today than at the time
of the symposium. After all, the symposium took place in a society with drastically
different norms about love and sex. More importantly, the canonical love story at
the time of the Symposium involved an elderly man and a young boy. Today, on
the other hand, our canonical love story involves a young man and a young
woman.
Nevertheless, this
seems hardly problematic to Diotima’s account of love. This is because she
holds that her account sketches a picture of love that goes far beyond the
certain story “according to which lovers are those people who seek their other
halves." Though the canonical love stories may be different, Diotima’s point doesn’t
lose its strength—love encompasses far more than just that. Consequently, Diotima would seem to think that today’s
canonical love story is just as inadequate when it comes to explaining the
nature of love as the one in ancient Greece.
But what kind of
thing is love? In answering, Diotima introduces the notion of love being a
verb—a relation between a subject, the lover, and an object, the beloved. Accordingly,
love has three constituents—the lover, the loving relationship, and the
beloved. Moreover, Diotima tells us that love is being a lover, rather than being loved. This clarifies why it is
not until we fall in love for the first time that we experience love at first
hand. A child, through being loved by her parents, may have an indirect idea of
what love may be like, but she does not experience it first-hand. This is
because, as Diotima claims, love is being a lover and not being loved.
Naturally, we then
ask ourselves what kind of things afford our love? What is deserving, or
worthy, of being loved? Diotima, for one, suggests that to love is to desire the
beautiful. Note that she introduces the notion of love as desiring to possess
something, which gives love a certain neediness that did not enter the picture
in the previous accounts of love. The notion of love as possessive hardly seems
far-fetched. The way in which we talk about love seconds this. We often say, “I
am so happy that you are mine”, implying a notion of love as possession. A
reasonable interpretation of Diotima’s position further holds that we desire beautiful
things only when they are good. This is reflected in finding ourselves wanting
more than “just good looks." We all desire to possess the good, because
possessing the good is happiness. That is where the why-questions must stop and
what serves as the explanation for why we love—because we want happiness, or in
other words, to possess the good. This, again, strikes us as very plausible.
Our conception of happiness indeed seems to be concerned with making ours what
we see as good.
This notion of
love brings with it a question of duration and thus time. We must ask
ourselves, after all, how long we want to be happy for, and consequently how
long we want to possess the good for. Just as Diotima claims, the natural answer
is “forever." We want to be happy forever, and by extension want the good to be
ours forever. Diotima thus identifies happiness, the desire to possess the good
forever, as the object of love. But how could we possess something forever when
we are mortal? We are limited in our time here on earth, but desire to possess
the good forever. How can we reconcile the two?
The reconciliation
can be found in Diotima’s conception of the purpose, or ergon, of love. Another
way to ask about the purpose of love is asking what in loving the beloved the
lover wants to do. The answer Diotima gives us is “giving birth in beauty,
whether in body or soul.”
A reasonable interpretation of this idea would be that the lover wants to
perpetuate that thing about the beloved which elicited her love, so that it may
“stand the test of time”—catering to her desire for forever-ness. Accordingly,
all love is sexual in the sense that it drives us to reproduce—but not only in
the way of biological reproduction. The way in which this sexual-ness and drive
for reproduction manifests itself depends on the kind of thing the lover loves.
Though all things that are loved are manifestations of the good, they may be of
appetitive, spiritual, or rational nature. Accordingly, the way in which the
lover is driven to reproduce will be of the same nature as her beloved. A lover
of appetitive manifestations such as a beautiful set of eyes will be driven to
reproduce in appetitive ways, such as having children with the owner of the
beautiful eyes, so that the beauty of those eyes may be perpetuated in her children.
A lover of spiritual manifestations of the good, such as Achilles, will be
driven to reproduce in spiritual ways, such as Achilles’ honorable death which
in effect helped perpetuate a tradition that values honor. And finally, a lover
of rational manifestations of beauty, namely philosophy, will be driven to
reproduce in rational ways, which is to say in ways that perpetuate the
enterprise of philosophy. This notion of giving birth in beauty, whether in
body or soul, explains the intuitive drive and desire for creating something
that will “stand the test of time” we experience when in love with a
beloved—whichever kind of manifestation of the good this object may be. We are
driven to have children, perpetuate traditions, and perpetuate cultures of
rationality so that the thing which we love may
live on once we are no longer.
Thus, Diotima teaches us a profound lesson about
love, namely that all love is sexual, but not in the way we think. Rather, all
love is sexual in a broadly interpreted reproductive way, the type of which
depends on the kind of thing we love. Diotima expresses this idea as giving birth
in beauty, whether in body or soul. We may interpret it as creating something
that perpetuates the manifestation of beauty that elicited our love, so that it
may elicit love in others.
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