Plato: Love is a Serious Mental Disease

Two

Philosophical Perspectives from

Phaedrus:
View

from the rim of heaven

(Phaedrus 247b)

View

from the Chariot: (Phaedrus246b)

Phaedrus:
(1) Lysiass Speech: Sex without
passionate attachment as the ideal:
(231a-234d) argues that it is better to have
a love life with someone who is not in love
with you, because the strong emotions
associated with love cause pain and
unpleasantness between lovers, while
lovers who merely use one another for
pleasure wont suffer those disturbances.

Phaedrus
2) Socratess First Speech: An Argument Against Love
(237a-241d): Socrates argues that passionate love is bad for
the person in love, because it makes those who are in love
stupid and disgusting, and it is bad for the person who is
beloved because lovers love the beloved the way wolves love
lambs. (241a) A love will fear losing the beloved, and so will
want to keep her or him weak and dependant. So just as lambs
have reason to avoid the wolf, those who are loved by others
need to protect themselves and should probably flee. Socrates
implies, peculiarly, that indeed it is much safer to have a sexual
relationship when love is absent.
(Epicurus agreed!)

On the feeling of crazy passionate love:

Is the advice to avoid upsetting passions like

love, because theyre disturbing?
Who wants that? I'd rather choose to fall in
love and be hurt. Sometimes I can't even
sleep because I love someone so much. And
there's always sadness in our lives. It's that
sad feeling that keeps us going. Because if
we can overcome that sadness, we can hope
for happiness in the future. House

Phaedrus
(3) Socrates Second Speech: Love as divine
madness (244a-257c) There is no truth to
that story,that when a lover is available you
should give your favors to one who doesnt love
you instead, because he is in control of himself
while the lover has lost his head. That would
have been a fine thing to say if madness were
bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best
things we have come from madness, when it is
given as a gift of the God.

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness

Two Varieties of Madness: There are two kinds of
madness, one produced by human illness, the other
by a divinely inspired release from normally accepted
behavior.
Four Kinds of Valuable (Divine?) Madness:
(i) Madness of prophesy (244c)
(ii) Madness to escape guilt and hardship (244e)
(iii) Madness of Poetry (245a) and
(iv) Madness that overtakes us when we perceive
beauty with the eye of love (249d)

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness

When he sees a form that has captured beauty, first he
shudders and a fear comes over him like those he felt at the
earlier time. Then he gazes at him with the reverence due to a
god, and if he werent afraid people would think him completely
mad, hed even sacrifice to this beloved person as if he were
the image of a God. Once he has looked at him, his chill gives
way to sweating and a high fever, because the stream of beauty
that pours into him through his eyes warms him up and waters
the growth of his wings. Meanwhile the heat warms him and
melts the places where the wings once grew, places that were
long ago closed off with hard scabs to keep the sprouts from
coming back; but as nourishment flows in, the feather shafts
swell and rush to grow from their roots beneath every part of
the soul (long ago, you see, the entire soul had wings).

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness

Phaedrus 251c-d: Now the whole soul seeths and
throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are
just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and
itchingthat is exactly how the soul feels when it
begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and
tingles as it grows them. But when it looks upon the
beauty of the beloved and takes in the stream of
particles flowing into it from his beauty (that is why this
is called desire), when it is watered and warmed by
this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy.

Phaedrus (251d-e): When, however, it is separated from the

beloved and runs dry, then the openings of the passages in
which the feathers grow are dried shut and keep the wings from
sprouting. Then the stump of each feather is blocked in its
desire and it throbs like a pulsing artery while the feather pricks
at its passageway, with the result that the whole soul is stung all
around, and the pain simply drives it wild. But then, when it
remembers the beloved in his beauty, it recovers its joy. From
the outlandish mix of these two feelings-- pain and joycomes
anguish and helpless raving: in its madness the lovers soul
cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning,
wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty.
When it does see him, it opens the sluice-gates of desire and
sets free the parts that were blocked up before. And now that
the pain and the goading have stopped, it can catch its breath
and once more suck in, for the moment, this sweetest of all
pleasures.

The phomenology of love at Pheadrus 251a-c:

We see
We react with a shudder of awe (remembrance!)
We are drawn to regard the beloved person
almost like a God.
Chill, sweating, fever, a melting of the soul
Throbbing, aching passion
Compare Sappho Fragment 31: Follows almost
the same sequence!

Platos Defense of Love in Phaedrus:

1) Platos description does not defend love as
a reasonable activity it is something that
transports us.
2) The value of this transport is still (in part)
that it raises our minds to things that are
higher and most real. But this is part of a
process that involves the other person
essentially, not merely as an accidental
means.

Platos Defense of Love in Phaedrus:

3) Platos account of love incorporates
something like a modern view that people
in love will commit their lives to one another.
4) Interestingly, Plato claims that wise lovers
will abstain from sex (?!) because the
attraction of pleasure might change the
quality of their experience of each other.
Abstinence (apparently?) keeps the
passions alive more effectively. (?!)

Two Conceptions of Love in Plato?

(i) In Symposium, this reaction to beauty (not described in
such appreciative terms!) was presented as the first step in a
process that would lead us, ultimately, to abandon the
individual for the sake of a more abstract and intellectual
devotion to beauty itself.
(ii) In Phaedrus, this is described as a divine madness that
constitutes the first stage in a lifelong relationship of
devotion, after which the devoted lovers sprout wings
together and ascend to bliss.