Platonic love
Philosophers "are born with the pursuit of the essence of existence, unlike the average person, who dwells on the observation of individual things." He goes further, without losing his courage or leaving Eros until he fully grasps the nature of all real existence. ...... Approaching true existence, he will unite with it, create reason and truth, and he will gain knowledge. Now he is truly living, growing, and free from the pain of childbirth. This is the true meaning of "platonic love."
In daily life, if someone mentions the name platon, it mostly refers to "platonic love." This kind of love emphasizes not the desire and enjoyment of the senses, but the spiritual love, based on respect for the personality of the other party. But if you ask why people call this kind of love exactly "platonic love," the answer is not so simple. We may even think that associating this love with the name of this philosopher is simply a bit of a slap in the face.
Female contempt
For, no matter what Plato's writings are opened, there is no praise for women. Instead, Plato claimed that women were far inferior to men in terms of morality. They are weaker than men, and therefore sinister and cunning than men. He believes that women are frivolous, easily agitated, easily angry, like to scold people, but also timid and superstitious. This is not enough. Plato even asserted that being unfortunate enough to become a woman is certainly God's punishment. Because only those men who cannot control themselves in life, who are timid and afraid of things, and who have no sense of justice, reincarnate as women after death.
People who despise women so much, of course, do not attach great importance to delicate emotional impulses when it comes to marriage. This is exactly what happened. Plato did not look at marriage from the perspective of the mutual admiration of both men and women and the creation of life together. He believes that what brings women and men together should not be love. The purpose of marriage is to procreate, and the task of marriage is to produce the strongest and healthiest offspring possible. Therefore, it should be the duty of the city-state to make suitable men and women husband and wife, and the city-state should interfere in the matter. Men showed bravery in war, and as a reward, the city-states assigned women to them. More radically, women should be seen as the common property of men. In this way, plato's understanding of marriage is not based on spiritual harmony and admiration.
Socrates with a pretty young man
Of course, in Greece at that time, there was another kind of love that prevailed. Compared with the marriage of men and women, it provides a more suitable place for delicate spiritual love. This is the old man's admiration for boys. Today people like to look at this relationship with a skeptical eye, but in Plato's time greece, it was almost fashionable for city-state dignitaries or generals to be interested in beautiful boys.
Plato recounts the situation of his teacher, the great Socrates, in this regard. It is said that Socrates was particularly fond of associating with young men. He once confessed that he was fond of philosophy and, second, of Alcabiades, the gifted and intelligent prodigy of athens. Also, Karlmid was recognized as the prettiest of the Athenian youth. One day he sat down next to Socrates, who recalled the scene and said, "I was embarrassed. I thought I would be very calm and relaxed in my conversation with him. But unexpectedly, I felt overwhelmed, really a bit like sitting on a needle felt. ”
The relationship between Socrates and young men is not an ordinary romantic relationship. From Plato's narrative, we can see what the so-called "platonic love" really means. There is a passage in The Drinking That young Alcabiades commenting on Socrates' words. Plato wrote that some of the influential thinkers in the city of Athens won prizes in the tragedy contest, and everyone gathered to celebrate. After three rounds of drinking, the atmosphere was warm and there was no end to arguments. Those present competed to praise the god of love, Love Jos. At this moment, Alcabiades walked in on the shoulders of a blowpipe woman. Spit out the truth after drinking. Alcabiades told something that was usually always regarded as a secret and did not want to divulge:
"You know, Socrates liked beautiful young men, always circling around them and being attracted to them", but in fact, "he was not interested in whether one of them was beautiful or not,...... Whether you are rich, or have some other praiseworthy advantage. I assure you that he thinks none of this is worthwhile and that we are nothing remarkable in ourselves. He spent his entire life in satire and ridicule of others. ”
Socrates' unique way of dealing with his lover, this love of total devotion to the other person and at the same time with restraint, that is, the kind of "platonic love", is closely related to Socrates' way of life as a philosopher. Taking Socrates as an example, Plato illustrates his own understanding of the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is the expression of the love of Jos, the god of love, and therefore a kind of love in its essence. Following Plato's example, later generations understood philosophy in this way, more or less as love.
It can be seen first from Alcabiades' dealings with Socrates that philosophical love is not sensual love, although it does not completely exclude sexual love. Sex is just the starting point for another kind of love, which is called "passion." Plato believed that the love of "passion" is the essential feature of philosophy. In order for this love to arise, sexual love cannot stop at the sensual enjoyment itself, let alone develop into lust and fornication. Only by overcoming sex can we enter into this higher level of love.
In "The Drink", Plato allows Socrates to narrate the process of sublimation from sexual love to philosophical love, which is vivid and gripping. Socrates claimed that he was telling him the secret that the prophet of the city of Maltina, Theotima, had taught him. Theotima told him that the true essence of Eros, Eros, was the pursuit of beauty, or to be precise, the desire to unleash his creativity in beauty. Theotima said that this is the eternal and immortal place in life.
Those who pursue beauty want to possess beauty forever. Lovers want to live forever and hope not to die, which is the essential feature of love. This desire for immortality can only be realized in the process of transmuting short-lived beauty into eternal beauty. All people want not to die. Physiologically fertile people find women to have sex, as they think, to create immortality through childbearing, to create the pursuit and vision of the future. But what about those who are mentally fertile? What do they do? ......
If they were spiritually creative from young to mature, if he wanted to conceive and have children, I think he would go around looking for someone who could combine with him to create beauty, because he was obviously unwilling to unleash his creativity through ugliness. If he had this kind of creativity, he would be attracted to a toned body and would not be intoxicated with ugliness. If he finds a noble, upright soul in a healthy body, he will feel that both the body and the soul are attracted to him. With this kind of person, he will think like a fountain, create countless moral words, and find answers to these questions about what good people should do and what they should pursue. He would think of educating him, associating with him, creating what his creativity had always wanted to create. At all times, he thinks about this, nurturing what has been created with the other person. Thus their relationship is closer than the marriage of their children, the tacit understanding of the heart, the more stable friendship, because what binds them together is a more beautiful and permanent offspring, a spiritual product.
Look for the true original beauty
It was only then that Plato began to discuss the true meaning of the original philosophical love. He asked Theotima to go on to say:
Socrates, I can also tell you the mystery of it. I am more than happy to do so. But whether you can fully grasp and get inspired, I don't know. If you have the ability, you should do the same. You know, if people understand this love correctly, the things mentioned above will happen. You know, whoever wants to do this in the right way should love a beautiful body when he is young; if he is properly guided, he must first love a body and create beautiful thoughts through it. Then he must have discovered that the beauty of any body was originally connected with the beauty of all other bodies, and had a sisterly relationship. Moreover, if he is to seek the true original beauty, then he will find that the beauty in all the bodies is the same beauty, otherwise he would not have understood beauty. Knowing this, he will worship all beautiful bodies, and will not think of a single body that he has worshipped in the past, and will show contempt for it. Then he will think that the beauty of the soul is more valuable than the beauty of the body. In this way, if someone has a beautiful soul but a mediocre appearance, he will not mind, because that is enough. He will love him, care about him, create beautiful ideas, and try to educate young people better. In this way, he must pay attention to the beauty of morality and law, and he will see that all these beauty is related and connected. Then he will despise physical beauty. After seeing the beauty in morality, he must pursue knowledge in order to obtain the beauty in knowledge. After seeing many different kinds of beauty, he will not dedicate himself to some single beauty... He will step into the vast ocean of beauty, and in the observation of beauty, he will create many great languages and ideas of beauty. He will not hesitate to love wisdom until he matures further and realizes the only beauty, which is beauty itself. Now his love for things has reached its goal. He would suddenly see something very peculiar, something very beautiful by nature. O Socrates, this is the kind of beauty that all the thinkers who had previously sought so far. This beauty is eternal, neither producing nor dying, neither increasing nor decreasing. In addition, it does not become beautiful one moment and ugly one moment. It is the only thing that is free, and therefore eternally existent, but all other beauty somehow occupies a part of that beauty.
If a person rises step by step in the way mentioned above through his true love for a boy, then he will see this beauty and almost reach his goal, because this is the right way to love. That is to say, in order to find true beauty, he takes a single body as his guide and ascends a step up the ladder, from knowing a beautiful body to knowing two, from two to all. From knowing the beauty of the body to knowing the beauty of the moral life, and then to knowing the beauty. From the general understanding to the knowledge that does not care about anything else, but only with this beauty. ...... For man, if there is still value in life, the value of life is here, because what man sees now is beauty itself.
In this way, the deep meaning of "platonic love" is clear. It does not simply exclude sex, but gives sex limited power and leeway, and what is important is to go beyond sex and pursue a higher form of love. Through the beauty of the body, the beauty of the soul, the beauty of morality, and the beauty of cognition, we finally enter into beauty itself. Plato's pursuit of love is the pursuit of beauty itself, the idea of beauty, and all beauty occupies a part of beauty itself. Thus, "platonic love" is closely linked to Plato's ideas.
Attachment and pursuit of ideas
Trees want to be trees as much as possible, people want to be human as much as possible, and justice wants to be as good as possible
The theory of ideas is Plato's most outstanding contribution to the history of Western thought. Of course, Plato himself did not discover his theory of ideas through the path of philosophical love. He was first and foremost frustrated with the political status quo of the time and the pain of the decline of the city-state. It is said that when the young aristocratic son met the philosopher Socrates, he burned his poems and began to study politics feverishly, exploring such questions as what justice was. Of course, what he has seen and experienced with his own eyes is full of injustice and corruption. Socrates, for no other reason than to discuss morality and justice, was sentenced to death. Since this man who had taken the world as his own responsibility had been framed and killed, the city-state must have been in an abnormal state. There is no other cure but to rethink, what is the basis of the city-state? That is, to think about what the nature of justice really is.
In this way, Plato became a philosopher, because he wanted to explore what justice really was, and what other correct attitudes were, such as bravery, reason, piety, and wisdom. In pondering these questions, Plato discovered that we are born to know what is righteous and what other moral qualities are. These ideas of moral behavior are already carried in the human soul. These ideas can and should determine people's actions.
Through further study, Plato has a second discovery: only from the idea of justice can we determine that an action is just, that an action is unjust, or that one action is more just than another. Moreover, this intrinsic connection between reality and ideas applies not only to the scope of human action. We know what a tree is because we have the idea of a tree. We are able to know the whole reality only because we already have the idea of all beings in our souls. It is only by looking at these ideas that we can say that this is a tree, that it is an animal, that this act is sin, that act is goodness.
But it further means that all realities exist because they occupy a part of their respective ideas, because they are all trying to align themselves with them as much as possible. Trees want to be trees as much as possible, people want to be human as much as possible, and justice wants to be as good as possible. Everything strives to realize its own unique ideas in its existence. In this way, Plato acquires a vivid picture of the world: the world is a place. Here, everything is constantly striving in the direction of perfection. The world is the attachment and pursuit of ideas.
Plato further deduces that if this is the case, it must be admitted that what exists is not concrete things, but the ideas of those things. Concrete things exist because they possess part of the idea. Because these ideas are the original, the real, the actual existence. Concrete things are only copies of ideas, so there is no high degree of truth. What is really in existence is in the depths of real existence. Also, things are producing, changing, dying. Temporaryity is the fundamental feature of the existence of things. "That's not the case. The idea of justice is always the same, and so is the idea of the trees. This is what Theotima said: beauty itself, the idea of beauty, is "eternal, neither arises nor dies, neither increases nor decreases." "There is no temporary existence. The pursuit of the whole world is the pursuit of the original existence, the pursuit of the temporality of eternity. Plato believed that this was the secret of reality.
Philosophy is the most beautiful of all the gifts that the gods have given to mankind
Proceeding from this idea, and then observing the essence of man, it is inevitable to conclude that man can recognize the existence of reality because the concept of real existence always appears in front of man's eyes. But where do these ideas come from? They are clearly not created and designed by man himself, nor are they acquired by experience in his own limited existence. Before one calls an act justice and a tree as a tree, one must already know what the nature of justice is and what the tree should look like. That is to say, man already knows justice and the origin of the tree before he knows it. In this way, the problem is still not solved. Where does this knowledge of man come from? Plato said that this knowledge, the knowledge of ideas, must have been acquired by man before his own finite existence, that is, in the being before he was born. When a person knows something, the idea of that thing shines before his eyes again. That is, the man recalls the idea he once saw. To know is to remember again. The doctrine of ideas necessarily leads to the existence of the soul before man is born, and henceforth the conclusion that the soul is immortal.
People have seen ideas before they are born. So what does this pre-birth existence look like? Plato gave a very vivid, very bold description of this. In the dialogue book Phaedo he recounts how the soul follows God, wanders above the firmament, and sees all the ideas that exist in reality:
"Zeus, the great sovereign of heaven, was the first to set out, riding on his two-horse carriage, commanding and mobilizing everything. He was followed by a group of gods and demons. ”
The souls of the people also followed them, sitting in the car, led by a driver. When they "come to the heights, they move on, breaking through the firmament and coming to the back of the celestial body." When staying there, a huge rotational force carries them around". They saw the sight within the firmament. "The spirit that is located in every soul accepts to the fullest what suits itself. In this way, the soul constantly sees existence, sees the truth, and approaches it, appreciates it, loves it, until the rotational force brings them back to where they were. In the midst of the rotation, the spirit sees the idea of justice, sees the intellect, sees the knowledge and other real beings, and rejoices in it. Then the soul returned to the heavens, back to the home, and the chariot led the horses into the manger, and let them eat the elixir and drink the jelly. ”
Before people are born, they have been fortunate enough to go through such a journey and see the existence of ideas. Throughout their lives, people have longed for this experience, always hoping to return to that place, back to their origins. Therefore, man always strives to get rid of the shackles of sensual desire, to see the idea itself by observing things in earthly existence.
Here, beauty has a specific meaning. In the dialogue book Phaedo, Plato says, "If a man sees beauty in reality and recalls the idea of beauty, he will be like a winged man, eager to take off." However, he was incapable of flying, so he could only look at the sky like a bird and ignore the earth. So people say he's crazy. But this passion is the most beautiful and noble of all passions. "This passion comes from a real idea. Everyone's soul has seen ideas, but not everyone's soul can recall ideas when they see concrete things. "Those souls who stayed there for a short time cannot recall, nor can those who fell down and were injured. The latter even renounced justice, did wrong, and forgot the sacred ideas seen at that time. Only a few souls still retain enough memories of what they experienced. If they saw something similar to the idea they saw at the time, they could not restrain themselves and could not help but become fanatical and excited. ”
Passion is the only way for man to see the essence of existence again in the world. Plato believed that philosophical speculation was this passion. Thus, speaking of philosophy, Plato said:
"Philosophy is the most beautiful of all the gifts that the gods have given and will give to mankind. There is no greater wealth than this. ”
Philosophy is the most perfect and superior love and pursuit of ideas, which enables people to get rid of the shackles of mediocre life and return to the side of ideas. Although philosophical speculation is similar to madness, Plato believes that this kind of madness is greater and more brilliant than any rational judgment, because reason originates from man himself, and the pursuit of ideas by Eros Eros is the work of gods. Finally Plato even said that Eros Eros was a philosopher. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and wisdom is one of the most perfect things. If Eros pursues beauty, then wisdom must be one of the fundamental objects of Eros' pursuit. Therefore, the love of God must love wisdom, that is to say, must love philosophical speculation.
Thus, Plato said in the Republic, philosophers "are born with the pursuit of the essence of existence, unlike ordinary people, who are stuck in the observation of individual things." He goes further, without losing his courage or leaving Eros until he fully grasps the nature of all real existence. ...... Approaching true existence, he will unite with it, create reason and truth, and he will gain knowledge. Now he is truly living, growing, and free from the pain of childbirth. This is the true meaning of "platonic love." This kind of love is the love and pursuit of the essence of things by people who make philosophical speculations. Without it there can be no true pursuit of eternity. So perhaps the French thinker Rousseau was right when he said that Plato's philosophy is that of the true lover.
Excerpt from The Rear Staircase to Philosophy by William Weisched, translated by Li Wenchao, Democracy and Construction Press, 2018-4