Introduction to Philosophy, Winter 2007

Plato: The Cave, The Divided Line, The Ladder and Love
The Conflict Between Logos and Eros

Platos Theory of Forms, Ideas and Images.

The theory of forms or ideas claims that there exists above and beyond
the world of sensible objects a world of supra-sensible objects which are the
ideal forms of sensible objects. Another way of explicating the theory is to
say that sensible objects are the mirror images of the ideal forms.
Platos complaint against the world of sense may be stated in this way.
Animals and plants, stars, rocks, tables, nature and all of our artifacts are
subject to change. The world of sense is a world of growth and decay,
multiplication and disintegration, time and passage. The world of sense is a
world of impermanence. Since it is always subject to change, no knowledge
of this world can be certain. Platos concern was that society through the
dissemination of images would divorce itself from the real and from truth.
Plato is thought to have made use of the Theory of Ideas as a means of
escaping Heraclitus conclusion that everything is in flux. There are some
things that are not in flux- IDEAS. So the claim that knowledge is impossible,
since all there is to know is the unknowable sensible world is refuted. Platos
account of the Forms of Ideas can be summarized as follows:

1. Truth cannot be attained by the senses which see only copies

and images: Reality can be apprehended by a process of
intellectual reasoning.
2. The Just, The Beautiful, The Good, etc, all exist as realities
inaccessible to the senses
3. The world of sense experience contains likenesses or images
of realities which have no perfect manifestation in the material
world.
4.These eternal realities are the FORMS or IDEAS which instances
in the world of the senses resemble, and in which they
participate (share, take part in).
5. The IDEAS or FORMS are intelligible.
6. TRUE knowledge is knowledge of the Eternal Ideas

For Plato, there is a world of eternal intelligible realities which the soul
has known directly when in a disembodied state before its incarnation. The
world we come to know by sense experience in our present embodied life
contains sensuous images of the eternal realities which can prompt us to
return in recollection to the Ideas which are their eternal intelligible

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archetypes. The true philosopher strives continually to purify himself from
the perception-distorting influence of the physical pleasures and pains to
which sensuous experience gives rise and to develop his capacity for pure
intellectual thought, which alone can attain to knowledge of the FORMS.

The Dialectic of the Divided Line and The Cave

KNOWLEDGE: NOESIS
a) pure, abstract, dialectical FORMS
reasoning
b) insight into, intuition of first THE FORM OF THE GOOD
principles TRUTH, JUSTICE

KNOWLEDGE: DIANOIA FORMS

a) hypothetical deduction Mathematical terms
b) mathematical reasoning
c)Scientific knowledge

The CAVE
The CAVE
VISIBLE THINGS
OPINION: PISTIS Animals, plants, artefacts, etc

a) belief

OPINION: EIKASIA VISIBLE THINGS

a) illusion, conjecture, Shadows, images, reflections

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Socrates distinguishes four states of mind each of which correspond to
one of the four divisions of the line. The four terms Socrates uses are
noesis, dianoia, pistis and eikasia.
Noesis: is pure, abstract dialectical reasoning, reasoning which moves
from hypothesis to first principles, from knowledge of scientific truth to
the ultimate principles in which all knowledge is grounded.

Dianonia: is both the process of reasoning used in mathematics and

the state of knowledge resulting from it. Noesis and Dianonia are
subdivisions of TRUE KNOWLEDGE.

Pistis: is belief about the visible world which may be true of false but
are not genuine knowledge.

Eikasia: is the term for the cognitive state corresponding to our

apprehension of shadows, images and reflections. It means illusion or
conjecture. Pistis and Eikasia are subdivisions of DOXA: opinion.

Platos Theory of Eros in the Symposium and Phaedrus

In what follows we will examine the manner in which Eros is

related to Beauty and Truth by focusing upon Platos Symposium and
Phaedrus.
In the Symposium, Eros desires fulfillment through the
contemplation of Eternal Beauty. The ultimate desire of Eros is to
overcome the sensual and to be united with the eternal.
In the Phaedrus, Plato argues that the image of Beauty in this
world prompts us to recollect its Form in the True World. Sexual desire
is nothing more than a shadow of the real fulfillment we will experience
when our union with the Form of Beauty itself is obtained. True desire
for Plato leads one beyond the sensuous world to the non sensuous
awareness of the Good.
In the Symposium, a middle period dialouge, Platos Socrates
elaborates the truth of Eros. The unique format of this dialouge
consists in the series of speeches. It is the only dialouge where
Socrates professes to know something. He is portrayed as a great
erotic who relates what he has learned about love from a woman
named Diotima. The dramatic setting is also important. The poet,
Agathon, has won a prize at a public festival while his friends decide to
give a party in his honor. The friends give speeches on Love. Love is
described as an awesome power. It is neither good nor bad in itself but
its affects on us can be devastating, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
These speeches emanate the mythic and traditional conceptions
prevalent in Greek society.
 Eryxmachus, a doctor, argues that the power of love is supreme
but that it has two faces. He understands love as health and ill-health;
as beneficial and as destructive. Love is therefore a pharmakon; it is
both poison and cure.
Aristophanes, the comic poet recites and ancient myth which
tells us of the bisection of ancient human beings:

Mans original body having been thus cut in two, each half
yearned for the half from which it had been severed.
Whence they met they threw their arms around one
another and embraced in the longing to grow together
again.

Aristophanes goes on to tell us that Zeus had taken pity on these

creatures because they were perishing. To alleviate their plight, he
moved their reproductive organs to the front of their bodies so that the
species could continue. Aristophanes therefore argues that sex is a
physical make shift. Sex is needed, for procreation in our divided
states; it may provide a rudimentary union with another person; but in
itself it does not explain the nature of love. Aristophanes argues that
the whole question of love becomes nothing more than the problem of
finding ones lost half.
For Plato, love is not a desire to be united with half or with whole.
Love is a desire for the perpetual possession of the Good. Aristophanes
argues that we look for our other half driven by the need to be healed.
Or in other words, he thinks that our incompleteness can be healed
through the power of love. The obvious problem with this position is
that, you, as a person cannot become yourself through another person.
A relationship consists of two complete beings and not two fragmented
halves that form a whole. Only the Self can complete the Self. In other
words, as Individuals, we must strive for our own completion.
Agathons speech elaborates the nature of the god of love. Love
is the youngest and greatest power. For Agathon, love is love of beauty
in all its forms-sexual, cultural and civic. The power of love is equal to
the power of beauty. Love is that which is supremely beautiful. Love is
the source of vitality and creativity. Beauty for Agathon is impersonal.
Love is Beauty IN a person and not Beauty OF the person. Agathon
argues that love is love of something. Therefore it is relative, and if
love is relative, love cannot be a God, because God is absolute.
Socrates shifts the conversation into a different position. The question
no longer is, who must one love and under what conditions can love be
honorable both for the beloved and the lover, but what is love in its
very BEING. Platos Socrates inquiry is therefore Ontological rather
than existential.
Diotima, the woman who teaches Socrates about love, inquires
into the BEING of love, while neglecting the manner in which love
exists concretely. Socrates wants to argue that the pleasures of love
should be directed to the Soul. But how can a sharp line of
demarcation be drawn between love of the body and love of the soul?
Perhaps Michel Foucault provides and answer when he writes, that it
is not exclusion of the body that characterizes true love in a
fundamental way; it is rather that beyond the appearance of the
object, love is a relation to truth.
Socrates is a philosophical erotic because he, as master of erotic
truth teaches his students how to overcome their bodily desires. He
points out that by understanding the true nature of Eros, we will
understand the Truth. We will be released from our chains. In the
language of the Phaedrus, we must turn to the right, to noble love and
beauty, away from the affects of vulgar love. Contrary to Aristophanes
assertion, Socrates argues that we not seek our other half, if such a
half even exists, but the truth to which the soul is related.
The ethical task for the Socrates of the Symposium, is to
discover and hold fast without ever letting go, to that relation to truth
which was the hidden medium of our love. The quest for erotic truth
requires that the person become ascetic after a period of promiscuity
to achieve exposure to truths disclosure. Socrates is moved by the
force of true love while knowing how to truly love the truth that must
be loved.
Philosophic Eroticism requires the right ordering of desire; to
achieve that ethical position which would make the right ordering of
desire possible. The basis of Eros in human nature is negative because
we can only love what we dont have. Love is a desire that ceases
when the desire has been obtained. The gods could not love because
love is a sign of imperfection. The more imperfect an individual is the
more that individual would love. A perfect being does not love since
desire has been eliminated.
Diotima teaches Socrates that love is neither beautiful nor ugly.
Love is in the middle between these two. Love is placed in the middle
between positive and negative. One who is totally bad cannot strive for
truth, nor can one who is totally good. Striving occurs in that middle
ground. Our present condition is negative because our striving is
directed toward the future, which was our past, according to Platos
Theory of Forms. Diotima teaches Socrates that all life is directed
towards the Future. With such a theory, the present moment is
forgotten.
A living being is temporal, but no living being accepts death. The
temporal wants to partake of the eternal. This dualism illustrates that
nothing in nature is natural. The True World for Plato is beyond this
Unnatural world. Diotima points out that most individuals desire
immortality through fame or glory. But the ultimate desire for
immortality should be fulfilled by beholding the Forms themselves
which are THE BEAUTIFUL.
 Diotima teaches Socrates that love is the pursuit of the Beautiful,
so that one might posses it forever. According to legend, Eros came
into being when Plenty mated with Poverty. Their child was Eros. Eros is
a mixture of Plenty and Poverty. These opposites live together in one
daemonic being. When a person loves, they desire to posses one who
is beautiful. The desires of the body lead one to beget children of the
body. The person who is pregnant with spirit desires to give birth to
noble thoughts. Diotima informs Socrates that even he can enter into
these lesser mysteries but he may not have the strength to climb the
ladder of love.
The ladder of Love, exemplifies the Platonic education in Beauty.
As Diotima instructs Socrates:

For let me tell you the right way to approach the things of
love....beginning from these beautiful things to mount for
that beautys sake ever upward, as by a flight of steps,
from one to two from two to all beautiful bodies and from
beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits and practices and
from practices to beautiful learnings so that from learnings
he may come at last to the perfect learning which is the
learning solely of that beauty itself; and may know at last
that which is the perfection of beauty.

We are told of a dialectical movement by which we love one body, then

several bodies. The next step advances the person to the knowledge
that the soul/mind is more beautiful than the body. From their the
person sees the beauty of laws and institutions and science until at last
the person apprehends Beauty itself.
For Plato, this world was in flux. Nothing was constant. The Real
world of Forms was constant, unchanging and eternal. In the world of
becoming the person is in a state of desirous ignorance. Through
striving the person overcomes aesthetic Eros to reach epistemic Logos.
The desire for the Good/Beautiful reminds the person of that from
which we were separated. In other words, re-union implies a previous
union.
The Soul in the Phaedrus is tripartite. It is compared to a chariot
pulled by a black and white horse and steered by a charioteer(Reason).
The various winged souls trample each other in their desire to obtain a
vision of the Forms. Many souls have their wings broken; these souls
fall to earth and become embodied but they retain a recollection of the
partial vison of the Forms.
Platos epistemology is based on recollection or remembering an
Idea that was forgotten. This forgetting is necessary and unavoidable.
Plato developed his theory of recollection throughout his writings. For
example, in the Phaedo Plato argues that we have certain ideas such
as the idea of Equality. This idea could not have been acquired in this
world of particular sensible objects. Plato argues that we, as human
beings must have existed as souls prior to our being born into an
earthly body. Our task in this life is to re-collect the Ideas we
encountered before our embodiment.
Platos doctrine of recollection can be criticized for in its
epistemological and psychological aspects. Plato, with his two world
metaphysics argued in favor of a separate world of Forms. It was this
world which was Real. In our unreal embodied world an individual could
only have opinion. In order to obtain knowledge, the person would
have to practice a form of death, by devoting his/her life to the
development of the Soul. In Platos epistemological network, there
cannot be any new knowledge. New knowledge cannot be acquired
since all knowledge is a recollection of what we already knew.
Acquiring knowledge in this life is nothing more than an act of re-
collection. The doctrine of re-collection also points out that reunion
presupposes a prior communion. In order to make sense of this
statement, an examination of the Phaedrus is required.
In the Phaedrus, Plato gives his analysis of the relation between
Beauty and Truth. He writes:

But it is not every soul that finds it easy to use its present
experience as a means of recollecting the world of reality.
Some had but a brief glimpse of truth in their former
existence; others have been os unfortunate as to be
corrupted by evil associations since they fell to earth, with
the result they have forgotten the sacred vision they once
saw...But Beauty was once ours to see in all its brightness,
when in the company of the blessed we followed Zeus as
other followed some other of the Olympians, to enjoy the
beatific vision and to be initiated into that mystery which
brings supreme felicity. Whole were we who celebrated
that festival unspotted by all the evils which awaited us in
the time to come and whole and unspotted and changeless
and serene were the objects revealed to us in the light of
that mystic vision. Pure was the light and pure were we
from the pollution of the walking sepulchre which we call
the body, to which we are bound like and oyster to its shell.

What strikes us in this passage is Platos attitude toward the Body. The
soul is imprisoned in the body waiting to be set free. The Soul must be
freed from the body so that it can attain pure knowledge. The more the
soul detaches itself from bodily elements the closer it comes to the
Forms. The two fundamental theses of Platonism are that the souls
union with the body is accidental to the soul and that the Soul is the
Person. The person is a soul that used the body. The body is an
inhibiting factor which must be overcome and transcended. In the
Symposium however, the body or the sensuous realm becomes the
springboard into the Forms. In this dialouge, the pleasure of the body is
not despised, it is needed, although it plays a secondary role. Needless
to say, Platos thought is full of inconsistencies. He mixes ascetic
thoughts with erotic formulations. The body should be despised yet at
the same time, the love of the body leads one to the love of the soul.
One wonders who is speaking. Is it Plato, is it Platos Socrates or
Socrates himself? It appears that Plato would prefer the logos without
Eros and that Socrates favored a mixture of Eros and Logos.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates teaches that madness of a certain kind can

be valuable. Erotic madness is the source of philosophy. Through divine
madness the philosophic erotic can use reason to make celibacy
possible; thereby furthering the quest for orderly and philosophical
knowledge. Socrates was an erotic not only because he knew the
nature of love but also because he knew the value of the erotic
experience. In the Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates to be like
Silenus who was the constant companion of Dionysus. In other words,
Alcibiades states the Socrates wisdom is concealed beneath an coarse
exterior. He also compares Socrates to Marsyas the satyr. The satyrs
were also connected with Dionysus are were beings with goat-like
characteristics addicted to very kind of sensuality. While declaring
Socrates to be sensuous, Alcibiades also points out that Socrates had
self control and courage and that no one has ever seen Socrates drunk.
This portrait of Socrates is different than the one Plato paints.
Plato argues that the Idea of Beauty occupies a unique position
in the realm of Forms. Beauty is the Form most suited to sight. For
Plato, sight is the beginning of knowledge. The ascent of the soul to
the intuition of Beauty is parallel to the ascent of the soul to the
knowledge of the Forms. The sight of beauty motivates us to aspire
toward Absolute Beauty. Thus Eros becomes a desire which transcends
sexuality. Eros and Truth are related because, the Good, is the only
object worthy of being loved or capable of giving knowledge about
reality. Here we see Plato advocating an intellectual, rational, non-
erotic, transcendental union. How is it possible that physical
stimulation can lead to metaphysical gratification? If in fact the
philosopher must turn away from the world of flesh in order to attain
an intellectual insight, why is there a need to bother with physical
stimulation in the first place? Thus Platos recommendation of
promiscuity as a means of liberation is inconsistent. Plato uses
individuals as a means towards an end. He writes: We cannot love
another person for himself, but only as a vehicle and partial
embodiment of what we really want- The Good.
Individuals for Plato are only vehicles used in obtaining the vision
of the Good, and as such, the vision of the Good is achieved at the
expense of the individual. Exiled to earth, the Soul remains alienated,
and is in a state of homelessness until it achieves re-union with the
Forms.