PLATO AND THE LOVE OF INDIVIDUALS

HeyJ XLIII (2002), pp. 311–327 

PLATO AND THE LOVE OF 

INDIVIDUALS 

T. BRIAN MOONEY 

The University of Notre Dame, Australia 

I 

A theory of love should explain that we love a person; that a person is 

in some way the paradigmatic focus of our love. Moreover, it is qua 

person that the beloved is loved and not just as bearer of loveable qualities 

or attributes; in other words, love is directed at the totality of the 

beloved and not identifiable (solely) with certain aspects of a person. 

As a result such love is held to be incompatible with the easy interchangeability 

of the beloved with some other with similar or ‘higher’ 

qualities and attributes. This is not to say that love is not transferable 

from one beloved to another but only that such transferability is subject 

to loss of the unique and irreplaceable individuality (personhood) of a 

particular beloved. 1 

This particular account of what a theory of love should provide is 

deemed by numerous philosophers to amount to a knock-down case 

against any theory of love which identifies what is loved as some complex 

of qualities/attributes or characteristics of a beloved. 2 Plato is the 

central figure who is held to have missed these features of love by 

supposing that what we really love in loving a person are their qualities 

of Beauty and Goodness. However, the critique goes a lot further and 

applies equally to any conception of agapistic love, or indeed to any 

theory of disinterested compassion-love (as in Buddhism). This is so 

because (aside from the theological difficulty of understanding any love 

relation as genuine because it is commanded) when we consider our 

grounds for loving another person as posited by the fact that he or she is 

a child of God, or as a divine ‘soul’ made by God, or in terms of the 

universality, anonymity and ready replaceability of each and every 

beloved, we are not deemed to be loving such persons as persons. Rather 

we are loving them because God commanded us to do so, or because 

they are God’s children, or because they have immortal souls. In each 

case precisely because the love is directed towards all, and thus everyone 

is loved, one instance of love is exactly the same as all others; each 

© The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

312 T. BRIAN MOONEY 

instance is identical to, and replaceable by, any other, and thus in a sense 

the love is anonymous and universal, independent of any of the particular 

features which render the person individual and unique. 3 

In this article I look carefully at the Platonic account of eros in order 

to ascertain just how far these general criticisms hold water. We must 

however, in dealing with Plato’s theory of eros, consider a further set of 

criticisms specific to the Platonic project, namely, the view that Platonic 

eros is egocentric and acquisitive. However, in this article I shall not just 

engage in historical exegesis in order to correct past misunderstandings 

of Plato, but rather I will be using Plato’s work as an example of how we 

might better understand the nature of love in our own lives. 

Plato’s theory of love is presented in numerous dialogues but for the 

purposes of this paper I will restrict myself to considering only the Lysis 

and Symposium. I will consider various interpretations of Plato’s writings 

and dismiss many of the criticisms of Platonic love, and I will present 

a Platonic account of love which goes a long way towards capturing 

something of the mysterious nature of love by identifying two separate 

but overlapping ways of loving. 

II. THE LYSIS 

The subject matter of the Lysis is a discussion of philia. Philia is the 

general term in Greek for friendship, but it is quite clear that in the Lysis 

and generally within the Greek philosophical tradition its meaning is not 

exhausted by the modern English word ‘friendship’. It is often used 

interchangeably with eros, but it also comprises the feelings of affection 

one has with regard to things, as well as to familial love (storge), and 

even captures some aspects of desire. 

In the Lysis, Plato employs the terms, eran, philein, agapan, epithumein 

and peri pollou poieisthai, sometimes interchangeably, but certainly as 

loosely demarcated but closely related subsets of philia. At 215a–d the 

terms agapan, philein and peri pollou poieisthai are used interchangeably. 

4 And importantly, even before the philia group of terms are introduced 

in the text, and the attraction of friends is settled as the initial 

topic of discussion, the conversation employs for the most part the eros 

group of words (204–206a). The background to the discussion is markedly 

erotic and the subsequent discussion is stamped throughout by the 

sexual orientation of the opening. In fact, the philia group is used 

exclusively only in the discussion of familial love between 207 and 210 

and in the attempt to spell out a meaning for what is ‘dear’ (211e–213d). 5 

In the remaining sections, from 214 through to the close, there is a 

mixture of all the terms mentioned above, sometimes used interchangeably, 

at other times with only subtle changes of meaning. The 

point to be taken from this is in substantial accord with Kenneth

PLATO AND THE LOVE OF INDIVIDUALS 313 

Dover’s claim that philia and eros do not designate separate realms of 

meaning, but that there is a high degree of ‘overlapping’ between the two 

terms. 6 Thus, since I will be assuming that the doctrine of love in both 

the Lysis and the Symposium is one and the same, these prefatory 

remarks should forestall any objections that I am conflating two separate 

doctrines. 

The Lysis provides us with a structural and analytic account of loving 

or befriending. In this dialogue Socrates conceives of loving as comprising 

three elements; a lover or subject who loves, an activity – loving – 

(which in the Lysis is captured by the idea of actively engaging in making 

something ‘dear’ to oneself, not just a recognition of value but the 

investing of [further] value in something over time), and an object of 

love or beloved. 

The motivational force which as it were enables the lover to love is 

grounded in the ontological endeia (lack) of the person who loves. 

Because persons are not self-sufficient, agents exhibit desire which 

seeks out objects and subjects to fulfil the lacks which are integral to our 

natures. On the existential level, lack or ‘need’ is experienced in the 

desire for a plurality of things, including the ‘need’ for a lover or friend. 

Corresponding to the nature of desire and lack Socrates also thinks 

that the object of love (whatever object) must also be loveable. In other 

words, there must be something in the nature of the object of love which 

elicits the loving of the lover. This is not to deny that the lover actively 

invests value in the beloved but rather is posited as a partial explanation 

for the grounds of attraction. Many objects are valuable in themselves 

but are not ‘loved’ in the special sense of the relation. In other words the 

recognition of value is not sufficient to characterize the special 

relationship of love. In love, recognition of value requires an activity on 

the part of the lover which maintains and deepens through valuation the 

relation with the beloved. 

It is surprising nevertheless that neither in the Lysis nor in Diotima’s 

or Socrates’s speech in the Symposium do we receive any full 

articulation of the activities of loving; this in part explains the unease 

many commentators have had with Plato’s theory of eros. 7 However, 

Plato’s preoccupation in both the Lysis and the Symposium is with the 

proton philon or first (final) object of love, and the phenomenon of love 

is discussed only insofar as it illuminates something of the path to that 

object. Throughout, the two dialogues are determined by that goal. 8 

Having established the logical grammar of philia in the Lysis – that 

philia is the name of a relation and that it comprises a subject who loves, 

an activity of loving (couched in terms of rendering and maintaining 

something as ‘dear’) and an object which is loved but which also elicits 

our love, Socrates’s dialectical questioning focuses on the nature of the 

relation between subject and object of love. Kosman, in what is still the 

most penetrating analysis of Plato’s views on love, correctly identifies


the crucial elements of the theory as presented in the Lysis. 9 Having 

identified what is loved in terms of ontological endeia, he writes: 

That of which one is endees is not simply that which one does not have, nor which 

one wants in the sense of desires, but that which one lacks, or wants in the sense of 

needing, missing and requiring for the fulfilment and completion of some nature. 10 

When Socrates finally suggests that what persons actually lack is the 

plenitude of the first (final) object of love, the proton philon, he goes on 

highly suggestively to identify a relationship between the ‘soul’ and the 

proton philon. He does so by tantalizingly (and without a rigorous 

argument) pushing the notion that the real meaning of our ontological 

lack resides in what is phusei oikeion, what belongs to us naturally. 

Kosman once again captures the point brilliantly: 

The conclusion [of Socrates’s questioning] is clear and interesting, for it suggests 

that the proton philon is that of which we may be said to be properly endeeis, 

and this is our own true but fugitive nature, that which for us is phusei oikeion, even 

if we are separated from it. … Erotic love is thus primarily for Plato self-love, for 

it is finally our true self which is at once native to us and lacked by us. 11 

The similarity between the position outlined here and that presented by 

Aristophanes in the Symposium is especially noteworthy, in particular 

where he says that Eros is a great god who leads us eis to oikeion …, eis 

ten archaian phusin. 

While the Lysis formally ends in aporia it has covered much groundwork. 

It has established the logical grammar of philia as being the name 

of a relation; 12 it has presented the formal structure of any philia relation, 

in terms of a befriender, a befriending and a befriended; it has identified 

but not articulated the active on-going valuation which characterizes the 

activity of befriending; and it has managed to suggestively tie up a nexus 

of ideas which intrinsically link the ontological lack of the befriended 

with an organic wholeness which the befriender attempts to overcome by 

loving the friend. (Moreover, the organic wholeness which is described 

as our true nature is both subject and object of love.) However, the 

emphasis of the dialogue lies in the vertical dimension of philia which 

takes the befriender in the direction of the transcendent object of love – 

the proton philon. While this is well-recognized it is complemented by the 

notion that there is an intrinsic relation between this transcendent object 

of love and our original nature. This insight will be of some importance 

later in the article. 

The importance of the Lysis in Plato’s articulation of a theory of love 

cannot be overestimated. Indeed it provides a kind of prolegomena to the 

account in the Symposium (rendered by Diotima via Socrates) which takes 

up the aporetic close of the Lysis by continuing to illuminate further the 

nature of the proton philon. That the two dialogues are intimately linked


is clear when we look at the dialectical interchange between Socrates 

and Agathon at Symposium 198b–201d. Here we get an almost verbatim 

rendition of the arguments in the Lysis which establish the logical grammar 

of eros as a relation and its structural elements, rendered now in the 

language of eros, as lover, loving and beloved. It is this analytic that 

provides the truth conditions for the subsequent myth of eros and afterwards 

the elaboration of the lower and higher mysteries of love. 

III. THE DIALECTICAL INTERCHANGE BETWEEN 

SOCRATES AND AGATHON 

As I have pointed out, the preliminary truth conditions for the proper 

discussion of love had been settled in the Lysis and repeated almost 

verbatim in the Symposium. I will briefly rehearse the manner in which 

they are dramatized in the Symposium and show how they affect the 

account given there of the nature of love and the lower and higher 

mysteries of love. 

The purpose of encomia is to render a eulogy or ‘good word’. In the 

Symposium the encomium will be to Eros, but Socrates immediately 

changes the ground rules adhered to by the other speakers. For Socrates, 

an encomium must be true for if it were not true it would not be good. 

Hence, he will deliver one which picks out the fairest of the facts about 

eros and praise them (198d5–7). (He will not focus on the destructive 

passion of eros so vividly portrayed in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and 

by Plato as the eros turannos of the Politeia.) 

Before presenting the encomium proper developed through Diotima, 

Socrates takes up the logical grammar of eros in his interchange with 

Agathon. He asks Agathon: 

So come now, complete your beautiful and magnificent description of Love, and tell 

me this: Are we so to view his character as to take Love to be love of some object 

or of none? (Symp. 199c8–d2). 

This is the same question asked in the Lysis. Formally it seems as if 

Socrates is asking whether or not eros is intentional – whether eros is 

eros of something. But this is not quite the point as Socrates goes on to 

suggest by amplifying his question. His clarification continues: 

My question is not whether he is love of a mother or a father – how absurd it would 

be to ask whether Love is love of mother or father! – but as though I were asking 

about our notion of ‘father’, whether one’s father is a father of somebody or not 

(Symp. 199d2–6). 

Socrates is thus highlighting that Eros like the term Father is the name 

for a relation. Moreover, it is the name for a relation which comprises 

the lover, the activity of loving and the beloved (see 200e–210a).


The lover desires the object of his/her love and thus lacks that object, 

but it is this lack that explains the very phenomenon of desire. We desire 

because we lack. Moreover, this phenomenon has both a temporal and 

an eternal element. Desire is not just for something lacked but for the 

preservation of what good we may achieve and which might be taken 

away. The point Socrates is making is fundamentally that desire has 

something of the infinite in its nature. The only thing that could possibly 

satisfy fully and completely the nature of a desirous and thus lacking 

being is the eternal satisfaction of desire or, from a slightly different 

perspective, the complete cessation of all desire. Such could only be 

found in a world-transcendent object of desire which is itself a pleroma, 

because the satisfaction of all temporal desires is capable of being lost; 

moreover, because we desire ultimately such an object, we desire to 

become that object or at least to be in the presence of that object. (On 

one reading at least this might be portrayed in Sartrean terms as the 

desire of the pour-soi to become a pour-soi/en-soi.) 

IV. THE LOWER AND HIGHER MYSTERIES 

Having established these distinctions Socrates introduces Diotima as 

source for the doctrine of eros to be presented. Mythically eros is the 

name of the relation which exists between the temporal and the eternal, 

the human and the Divine. That Eros cannot be God is ‘proven’ by the 

fact that human beings love and they establish the relation of love via 

desire which is grounded in lack. Since it is axiomatic that the Divine 

lacks nothing, love cannot be a divinity. Rather love is said to be the 

great daimon which unites the disparate orders of the real, or if not 

unites, at least establishes the relation between them. 

Because Eros is the name for a relation, it occupies the metaxy, that 

is, whatever is intermediate, whether that be conceived of as opinion, 

lying intermediate between error and truth, or the ‘realm’ between mortals 

and the Divine. Eros takes from its mother the brute fact that it is a 

relation between the Divine and the human, the Heavens and the world, 

and, it is intimated by Plato, the passive ‘intuition’ of this relation, and 

the element of lack. From its father it derives its capacities to scheme, 

hunt, create and fashion. In other words it derives its active or desirous 

element from the masculine side of its parentage, as is suggested also by 

the various meanings of poros – path, way, passage, but also resource. 

The active element provides the impetus to overcoming lack. 

The dialectical interchange between Socrates and Agathon reestablishes 

the logical grammar of eros together with a structural account 

of what eros involves, just as had been done in the Lysis. The myth 

relates these ‘logical’ categories of eros to the framework which establishes 

the relation between the human and the Divine. As a matter of


continuity Diotima will present a vision of the manner in which Eros via 

desire is always attempting to satiate lack and how such satiation requires 

a transcendent object of Eros. 13 

Diotima identifies the object of love as ‘having’ or ‘being in the presence 

of’ Beauty, following her question ‘what is the love of the lover of 

beautiful things?’ (204d6). (All references to the Symposium in this article 

are to the Loeb translation.) Quickly she identifies the beautiful and the 

good. However, drawing upon Aristophanes’s speech it is claimed that 

the lover is indeed searching for completion/fulfilment with the other 

half (205e) but only if that fulfilment is deemed good. 

Collecting the analysis provided by the dialectical interchange with 

Agathon and the myth, Diotima suggests that the essential motivation 

proper to love is that ‘love loves the good to be one’s own forever’ 

(206a12–13). Everyone qua lover is lover of the good. The method of 

achieving the good by the lover ‘is procreation in what is beautiful with 

the body and soul’ (206b8–9). 

It is at this point in the dialogue that a very new emphasis is placed 

on eros. Whereas before eros had been identified primarily in terms of 

the lover’s lack and the lover’s desires to ‘fill’ these lacks, it now takes 

on a distinctively ‘poetic’ role in including desires for begetting and 

bringing to birth. 14 Moreover, the two elements of love considered as 

lack and as desire to produce are maintained at each level of the ladder 

of love. Further, this is a corollary of the two aspects of eros identified 

in the myth of love where on one side love lacks its object and on the 

other it provides a means of achieving its object. 

Primarily eros (in the lower mysteries) is creative according to its 

thirst for immortality which is carried out through begetting. Just as in 

the animal kingdom a vicarious immortality is preserved through the 

propagation of offspring, so too at the human level, the creative desire 

to bring forth children is thought to be indicative of this desire for 

immortality. This is conceived of in terms of a general principle or law 

of nature. However, while animals are restricted in the sense that this is 

the only form of immortality open to them, humans can achieve a 

vicarious immortality in other ways according to their natural powers. 

So humans are in love with what is immortal (208e2–3) and achieve it 

according to both body and soul. 

From here Diotima leads Socrates ever upward in the so-called 

Higher Mysteries of love moving from love of a beautiful body to the 

vision of the Beautiful in itself. 

V. THE CRITIQUE 

The criticisms of the Platonic theory of love have a long and distinguished 

pedigree, and, as I have argued, they are applicable to any


theory of love which identifies what is loved in loving others as situated 

in anything other than the integral individual personhood of persons, 

whether that be conceived of in terms of a person’s qualities, attributes, 

characteristics or in terms of a religious command and its correlative 

account of why we ought to love persons, or indeed to the notions of 

disinterested love or compassion. In general, the following sorts of 

criticisms are found: Platonic love is (a) acquisitive; (b) egocentric and 

(c) non-personal. To these general criticisms can be added a more specific 

one: Platonic love devalues persons. The list of philosophers who 

have argued against Plato’s theory of love is impressive and includes 

Nygren, Vlastos, Nussbaum, Singer and Solomon. 15 

The voices which have stood out in favour of the Platonic view are 

few and even when they have attempted to vindicate Plato’s theory they 

have for the most part done so unconvincingly. Cornford and Markus 

attempted to show that Plato’s theory of eros is compatible with the 

Christian ideal of love-agape (as has Brentlinger), but even though they 

are convincing in their appeals, this fails to vindicate the Platonic theory, 

for as I have pointed out, the Christian view of agape suffers from the 

central problem that because it is commanded, universal and substitutable 

it cannot account for the unique and irreplaceable love which we 

have for special individuals. 16 So aside from the central merits these 

arguments have in establishing the compatibility of Platonic eros with 

Christian agape, the crucial objection still stands. 

Brentlinger, in arguing that Platonic eros cannot profitably or easily 

be distinguished from Christian agape provides a series of reflections 

which adequately resist the criticisms that Platonic eros is egocentric 

and acquisitive but does not convincingly show that Plato’s theory does 

not devalue persons. And the most penetrating analysis to date, by 

Kosman, while also showing that Platonic eros is not narrowly egoistic 

or acquisitive and that it is compatible with love of persons qua persons, 

fails to articulate an answer to the Symposium’s doctrine that persons are 

to be considered a ‘small’ thing in comparison to love of the Good and 

Beautiful. 

Let us rehearse the arguments here. Because Plato identifies the 

origins of love in ontological lack and subsequent operative desires to 

fill this lack, it is claimed that eros is essentially acquisitive. It seeks to 

appropriate the good for oneself and this is held to be incompatible with 

loving the other for his or her own sake. This argument is most 

forcefully pursued by Nygren. 17 Abstracting from Plato here, it can be 

argued that this is a rather futile criticism because it fails to capture 

the notion that we can have different kinds of desires, some selfish and 

some unselfish. For example, I can legitimately desire a better world not 

just for myself but for others and even for future generations. I can also 

desire the well-being of another person without that well-being being 

the source of any specific positive outcome for myself; and so for many


benevolent other-concerned desires. Desire, therefore, is not essentially 

acquisitive. But perhaps the objection is not so much general as specific 

to Plato. Thus, the claim will be that the Platonic theory of eros as 

articulated in the Dialogues is such that it is presented in a way which 

does not allow for this general response. Nygren writes: ‘Even where 

Eros seems to be a desire to give it is still in the last resort a “will-topossess”; 

for Plato was fundamentally unaware of any other form of love 

than acquisitive love.’ 18 Similarly, Singer suggests: ‘For desire is always 

acquisitive and its object a mere commodity designed to satisfy.’ 19 

These sorts of objections are, however, not fair to Plato. One of the 

problems which issue in these kinds of criticisms is grounded in a point 

of scholarship. It is often supposed that Socrates talks about the object 

of love being ‘possessed’ by the lover (200d10–11). However, the 

English term ‘possess’ is an inadequate rendition of the more neutral 

Greek echein. Echein and its derivatives refer to ‘having’ without the 

emphasis of ‘owning’ and ‘possessiveness’, and thus exclusivity. We 

talk, for example, of having a friend, even a best friend, without implying 

in any way that we own or possess the friend. Indeed in the Symposium 

Plato describes the relationship between desire and the good not 

just in terms of having (echein) but often in terms of the word parontas 

(being in the presence of). This latter term captures the transcendent 

quality of the good without implying that it is subject to ‘possession’ by 

a lover. Moreover, it leaves open the alternative sketch of desire presented 

above whereby we can desire the good for another without any 

stigma of acquisitiveness. 

A similar ambiguity attaches itself to the idea that what is loved are 

‘good or beautiful things’. Here the acquisitive aspects of Platonic love 

are highlighted by the idea that the lover desires good or beautiful things 

for himself or herself. Given that Diotima appeals to the notion of participation, 

it is perhaps not useful to maintain this translation. To better 

capture the force of the Platonic argument, the translation should be the 

good or beautiful as it inheres in things. Once again this suggests that 

there is not a relationship of possessiveness attached to the relationship 

with the good and beautiful, thus leaving open the notion that a more 

disinterested element can be present in desire. Admittedly, the ambiguity 

is difficult to dispel, as Plato in discussing the genesis of love and its 

transcending strains does indeed suggest that at one stage desire is for 

or of beautiful things. However, this refers to the genesis of love in 

finding objects and qualities which fill lacks. At later stages, love is 

clearly identified as of or for the qualities that inhere in things and not 

just of the things themselves. In what sense this can be seen as acquisitive 

possessiveness is at the least very unclear. 

Plato’s theory of eros is also held to be egocentric. This objection also 

fails on grounds analogous to the acquisitiveness criticism. Whereas the 

acquisitive objection holds that Plato’s account of love is determined by


possession of the object of love and is thus incompatible with loving 

another for his or her own sake, the egocentric objection pushes this 

criticism somewhat further by claiming that the motivation and activities 

of all Platonic love is focused on the self. Again the criticism focuses on 

the relationship between lack, desire, and the good/beautiful. However, 

it has rightly been pointed out by Brentlinger that Plato does not make 

desire and love synonymous: ‘Love, [Socrates] says, desires its object 

(200a). He does not say that love is a desire, much less that love and 

desire are the same.’ 20 

Indeed this seems fairly obvious. Clearly, I can desire many objects 

without thereby loving them. Love, however, includes desire both in 

terms of setting on an object to be loved and in terms of desiring to 

‘give’ or ‘procreate’ in the presence of the Good/Beautiful. Love is the 

name of a relation which is characterized partly in terms of desire, but 

includes active valuation and recognition. Moreover, it is precisely the 

egocentric interpretation of the lack/desire model which renders incomprehensible 

the crucial move in the Symposium between the lack/desire 

conception of the genesis of eros and the alternative vision that because 

all persons are pregnant in body and soul they desire to give/procreate in 

goodness and beauty. Once again this opens up the perspective which 

enables love to be considered in terms of non-egocentric desires. 

Platonic love is said to be non-personal. By this most commentators 

have meant that because eros is focused on the good/beautiful and thus 

on qualities which inhere in individuals, it is therefore only accidental 

that we love persons. In other words, persons qua persons are not the 

objects of love. In loving a person for his or her qualities, we are loving, 

as Vlastos put it, ‘that abstract version of persons which consists of the 

complex of their best qualities’. 21 To this he adds: 

Since persons in their concreteness are thinking, feeling, wishing, hoping, fearing 

beings, to think of love for them as love of objectifications of excellence is to fail to 

make the thought of them as subjects central to what is felt for them in love. 22 

The intuition that somehow the person loved is irreplaceable and unique 

and loved as such is deemed to be missing from the Platonic theory. 

This is a serious objection if our intuitions and experiences of love are 

to be vindicated. One reply might be to show that there is an integral 

relation between persons and their qualities and thus to exhibit the notion 

that the qualities are, at least in terms of the beloved, not separable. Thus 

to adulterate something of Brentlinger’s analysis, 23 we might argue that 

I love a pint of Guinness and in attempting to say what it is about 

Guinness that I love, I can point to certain qualities of the pint. I enjoy 

and love the manner in which it is pulled, its taste, its aroma and its 

colourful blend of dark and cream. When describing my love of a pint 

of Guinness this way it is not at all clear that I am saying that I love these


properties/attributes/qualities, and that the pint of Guinness is a means 

to achieving these ends. But in making these claims about what I love, I 

am doing no such thing; these are things about the pint of Guinness that 

I love, they are not separable from it. While I might also love a pint of 

bitter, also for its taste, its colour, its aroma, these qualities as instantiated 

are different to those in the pint of Guinness and thus in no way 

substitutable. In part my love for the pint of Guinness is attributable to 

historic/cultural circumstances peculiar to my own identity. 24 

Roger Scruton suggests that there is a difference between an emotional 

reaction to universals and one to particulars. 25 He is no doubt 

correct. One can, for example, love a universal like justice, caring about 

it passionately, as an ideal and working tirelessly to achieve justice in 

one’s own life and in the world around one. One also loves a particular 

person and the kind of attachment one has to that person does indeed 

seem different. Robert Brown appeals to this distinction in his 

platonizing conception of love in his book Analysing Love. 26 Brown thinks 

that love of individuals is to be understood in terms of characteristics or 

qualities. He argues that we love a particular person because that person 

exhibits certain qualities in a unique manner. Moreover, this concatenation 

of qualities, including potential ones, is part of an open-ended 

commitment to the bearer of these qualities, and thus leaves open the 

possibility that there may be development of new or different qualities. 

The universals (the qualities) are loved, then, as they are exhibited by 

the subject. In other words there is a symbiotic relationship between the 

universal qualities which both attract and are loved and the subject 

within which these qualities inhere. 

Now this sort of appeal seems to work quite well for the Platonic 

theory of eros. By arguing that what is loved in another person is not just 

qualities but the qualities as exhibited and instantiated in the beloved, 

one appears to avoid the difficulty that love is non-personal. If the 

symbiotic relationship between qualities and the subject which 

instantiates them is maintained one thereby explains the fact that one 

does love qualities but also persons. Moreover, it also, by appealing to 

the manner of instantiation, accounts for the historical features which 

contribute to the development of a love relationship as well as highlighting 

the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the particular instantiation. 

It might nevertheless be thought that the sort of symbiosis 

appealed to here is still not a love of the whole person. 27 However, aside 

from the difficulty of saying, let alone knowing, what constitutes a 

whole person, given that we can scarcely say that about our own self, the 

symbiotic argument is sufficiently open-ended, because of its appeal to 

the manner of instantiation, to sway the decision. 

However, there is still a more damaging objection to Plato’s theory of 

love which does not seem to be capable of being resolved by the above 

arguments. The previous arguments, which in principle the Platonic


theory can address, were arguments which attacked Plato’s view of love 

because it was deemed to be impersonal, not love of the whole person, 

and to be a love that is replaceable, egocentric and acquisitive. These 

objections, I believe, have been answered. But in the Symposium Plato 

seems to say that love of persons is of less value than love of qualities 

as instantiated in other things and ultimately to the Idea of Beauty/Good. 

The issue arises in the context of the transcendent mysteries of love 

proclaimed by Diotima. Here, after having suggested that the Higher 

mysteries require both a daimonic nature and a ‘guide’, she argues that 

certain minimal conditions of beauty must exist in the environment of 

the initiate before he or she can progress on the ladder of love. I take this 

to be a consequence of Diotima’s requirement that the initiate from 

youth must encounter beautiful bodies (and because elsewhere Plato 

insists that a sound environment is a prerequisite to right reasoning – see 

Politeia 491c). 

If the environment is suitable the person who is directed correctly must 

love a particular body and engender beautiful discourse (209a9–b1). 

This follows from the model that desire has a moment of lack and a 

moment of giving, creativity or bringing to birth. The next stage in the 

ascent comes when the lover acknowledges that what is beautiful in one 

body is adelphon or closely related to that in any other body. Moreover, 

if he seeks beauty in form (eidei) he must recognize that the beauty of 

each individual body is an example of beautiful bodies in general, and 

unless he is to be guilty of anoia he must come to love all beautiful 

bodies; and in doing so must also ‘loosen’ his attachment to one particular 

body considering it to be smikron. This is the first intimation that the 

transcending strains of eros involve a diminution in attachment to 

particulars, where the general take precedence over the particular, here 

specifically the beauty in all bodies over the beauty in one. But Plato 

will go further. Attention moves from the love of the beauty as it inheres 

in bodies to love of beauty in a single person, and then to the beauty 

exhibited generally in all souls. From here the vertical movement goes 

towards love of learning in general (the sciences), up to the final stage 

of the ascent which involves the ‘graciously’ given vision of the 

Beautiful/Good itself, the transcendent object of love. The problem 

becomes particularly acute because at each level of the ascent Plato 

suggests that certain negative attitudes (kataphronesanta b5–6) must be 

taken up in respect to the lower instantiations of the beautiful. This 

means, it would seem, that anything other than the Beautiful itself must 

be viewed negatively and thus also persons. This is strangely counterintuitive. 

A. W. Price has pointed out that the attitudes of disdain or looking 

upon the lower instantiations of beauty does not thereby render them not 

beautiful. As he puts it: ‘Diotima’s theme is that Beauty itself is 

supremely beautiful, and not that the lesser beauties are no beauties at


all.’ 28 Moreover, he goes on to argue that what Diotima rejects ‘is an 

exclusive devotion to some particular instances of beauty and not a 

liberal attachment to all kinds and instances of beauty’. 29 But even if this 

is true it doesn’t seem to do justice to the special nature of one’s love for 

another unique individual. Price thinks that the ascent can be interpreted 

‘as an account of how lover and beloved mutually develop their interest 

in beauties that are more universal (by advancing horizontally) and more 

high-flown (by advancing vertically)’. 30 But this seems to run counter to 

the expressed view of Diotima that one must divest oneself (at least to 

some extent) of attachment to the particular in favour of the path to transcendent 

beauty. 

The move from the recognition of beauty of soul to that of beauty of 

laws, institutions, branches of knowledge, philosophy and finally transcendent 

beauty involves, according to Diotima, a ‘lessening’ of value 

for particular instantiations. Price certainly presents an interpretation 

which gives some weight to the notion that in a certain manner the love 

of the individual beloved may be preserved throughout the ascent but 

this is not enough to suggest that the beloved is loved as a unique individual 

whole person. Price cites as evidence for his view 211b5–7 where 

Diotima says: ‘Whenever someone, ascending from these things through 

loving boys rightly (dia to orthos paiderastein) begins to see that 

Beauty, he would almost be touching the goal.’ And he thinks that this 

‘implies that right up at least to the beginning of the end of his ascent 

the lover is still, in a manner, loving a boy’. 31 Moreover, Price finds the 

strongest evidence for interpreting the ascent as an exercise of personal 

love in the fact that Diotima’s original definition of love involved 

aiming at: 

immortality through generation in beauty and in particular the educative pederasty, 

described in the so-called lesser mysteries of 200. Though it is only the discourse 

of 210c1 that is specified as being educative (c2–3), the emphasis upon discourse at 

every level (a7–8, c1–5, d4–6) confirms that communication is always the goal (209 

b7–c2). 

While I think there is clearly merit in Price’s view, it still seems to strain 

the text because; 1) it does not give sufficient weight to the notion that 

Diotima thinks there must be negative attitudes taken up in respect to the 

lower instantiations, 2) even if education and communication are still 

fundamental goals of the ascent, it is unclear in what sense the beloved 

is loved as person, and 3) as I have already pointed out, there are strong 

reasons for thinking that Plato holds that without having ‘seen’ 

Transcendent Beauty, all objects of love cannot be loved ‘truly’. Diotima 

tells us that once the lover has seen transcendent beauty, he will then 

bring to birth upon the visible manifestations of Beauty not illusions but 

true examples of virtue 212a5–7. Such ‘truth’ is clearly supposed to be 

contrasted with the ‘semblances’ mentioned earlier in the speech when


Diotima is talking about vicarious immortality. It might further be 

thought that just as it is only after having apprehended transcendent 

beauty that the lover can beget true virtue (212a7–9), it may be that only 

then is he capable of truly loving the particular. 

So it would seem that the final objection really does capture what 

Plato holds to be central to an account of love, and that therefore his 

theory does fail to accommodate some of our deepest intuitions about 

love of persons. 

However, while there is, I think, this inevitable tension in Plato 

between the concern for the transcendent object of love and love of 

persons, there may still be a further response which captures yet other 

intuitions about love. There is surely a difference between recognizing 

the transcendent object of love as the ultimate source of value and still 

holding that certain beloveds are still loved as unique individual whole 

persons. Plato argues that knowledge of the good implies a kind of 

identification with that object. Now if we follow this account it might be 

said that this process of identification marks out what is truly loveable 

in the other, such that in loving the person we are in some mysterious 

way loving what that person most essentially is. This was the doctrine 

espoused in the Lysis that the object of love is immanent in the soul of 

the persons. As Kosman puts it: 

To love the beautiful in me is thus to love my essential being, my ‘realest’ self. 

Provisionally and within the context of self-love, I suggest then that talk of beauty 

as the proper object of eros is talk of eros as directed toward what is truly native to 

us and that in turn (i.e. circularly) may be thought of as the self which manifests our 

good and beautiful nature: i.e. the nature which we love … In self-love, lover and 

beloved are one; but such love is always love of the ‘ecstatic’ self. 32 

Applying this insight to the love of others, Kosman continues: 

If I love A because of ϕ or love the ϕ in A, I should not be said to love something 

other than A if ϕ is what A is. Thus to love A for its beauty is to love A for itself. 

But loving A for himself is not totally unconditional agapic love, because in loving 

A for himself, I don’t love what A happens to be, but A qua beautiful and this means 

loving A for what he is, in spite of what he may happen to be, or for the mode of 

his being what he is. 33 

The views just expressed do seem to capture something of the mysterious 

element which many people commonly hold and which in part 

explains the difficulties even reflective lovers have in saying what it is 

that they love about the beloved. As presented here it is only a sketch but 

it goes some way to explain this mysterious element. Plato scarcely 

anywhere (except in his description of Alcibiades in the Symposium so 

brilliantly portrayed by Nussbaum, and in the Phaedrus) 34 discusses in 

any systematic way the special bond of love between individuals, his 

focus is always upon the transcendent object of love, but this does not


mean that his theory cannot accommodate an account of loving persons 

qua persons. 

VI. AN EXHORTATION 

To tie up the various reflections on loving persons in this essay, I would 

like to present a twofold conception. On the one hand love of a 

particular person is grounded in the historic/existential nature of a 

couple’s facticity. By this I mean that the reason I love Fionnuala rather 

than Siobhan who has the same qualities to a higher level than Fionnuala 

is explicable partly in terms of the history of my, and her, life. A range 

of factors partially explain my love including all those factors, 

sociological, cultural, genetic and historical that go into me being the 

kind of person I am and the kind of person she is. While it is true to say 

that I love her qualities, it is better to say that I love the qualities as 

instantiated in her, in other words, I love her as bearer of these qualities; 

and it is precisely Fionnuala as bearer of these qualities who is 

irreplaceable, unique and individual. While I might admire and even 

love such qualities or others in another person, my attachment of love is 

to the historical person Fionnuala, and is sustained by among other 

things commitment and care for her built up over many years of shared 

fortunes. 

But there are other senses somewhat more mysterious. Fionnuala, 

despite all the things about her that I love, often fails to live up to her 

own ideals. She is like myself all too human. But part of what I love 

about her are her commitments to ideals some of which I may not share. 

But it is not just that I love her commitment to certain ideals but rather 

that these are partly constitutive of her identity. The failure to live up to 

them, in no way abrogates that part of her self which identifies with them. 

She is in part her ideals even if they are so rarely achieved if indeed 

ever. In a sense I love her fugitive self. This follows one line of Plato’s 

reasoning. 

Moreover, there is also an important sense in which I love Fionnuala 

for her very being. Let us imagine, God forbid, that Fionnuala were to 

be involved in a car accident which left her comatose. She can no longer 

communicate with me, nor let us suppose, me with her. I still love her. 

Yet my love is clearly not directed towards her qualities or indeed presently 

any element of our historical vicissitudes. How is this explicable? 

It might be thought that I am loving a memory or series of memories of 

her. But this does not ring true to my experience nor indeed the 

experiences of people who have actually been in this kind of situation. 

So it might be that I love her in some form of expectation of her 

recovery. While this may be true it does not quite capture what it is that 

I love while she is comatose, and besides the doctors and surgeons have


advised me that she will not recover. Further unthinkable decisions for 

me may have to be made. Part of my own identity lies there with her in 

the hospital bed. Much of what is meaningful and good for me is also 

placed in jeopardy by this tragedy. 

There is a story told that each person has an immortal soul which is 

‘akin’ to the Divine, and while it is certainly the case that I love 

Fionnuala as embodied, there seems to be some kind of intuitive ‘rightness’ 

to the notion that ultimately what I love in Fionnuala (at least on 

one level) is her very being, her soul, her spirit. These provide some of 

the grounds for faith in this matter, though doubtless this element is 

largely abstracted from her concrete individuality, and may not even be 

individual. But it may be moreover that while logos fails and mythos 

takes over there is an experiential appeal to the notion that it is only from 

the depth of the experience of the loving person that we begin to 

understand what is involved in loving persons. 

Notes 

1 For an account of some of these undergirding intuitions to a theory of love, see, for example, 

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and 

Stephen Leighton, ‘What We Love’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 2 (1993), pp. 145–58. 

2 See for example, G. Vlastos, ‘The Individual as Object of Love in Plato’, Platonic Studies, 

Princeton, 1973. 

3 For a useful exploration of these issues see Robert Adams, ‘The Problem of Total Devotion’ 

in Neera Badhwar, Friendship: A Philosophical Reader (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 

4 See L. Versenyi, ‘Plato’s Lysis’, Phronesis 20 (1975), pp. 185–98. 

5 Ibid., p. 187 

6 See K. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 50. 

7 Some hints however may be gleaned from the speeches of Aristophanes and Alcibiades. 

8 The issues raised rather quickly here are explored in some detail in my ‘Plato’s Theory of 

Philia in the Lysis: A Defence’, Irish Philosophical Journal 7 (1990), pp. 131–59. 

9 A. Kosman, ‘Platonic Love’ in W.H. Werkmeister (ed.), Facets of Plato’s Philosophy (Assen: 

Van Gorcum, 1976), pp. 53–69. References in this article are to the version in A. Soble (ed.), Eros, 

Agape and Philia (New York: Paragon House, 1989). 

10 Kosman, p. 155. 

11 Ibid., p. 156. 

12 This point seems to have been missed by many commentators who tend to emphasize the 

intentional nature of philia/eros. Among commentators who have emphasized the distinction Plato 

makes see R. E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol II, The Symposium (New Haven: Yale University 

Press, 1991); R. E. Allen, ‘A Note on the Elenchus of Agathon: Symposium 199–201’, Monist 50 

(1966), pp. 460–3; and D. N. Morgan, Love: Plato, the Bible and Freud (New Jersey, 1964). 

13 For a fuller discussion of the arguments underlying the elenchus of Agathon see my ‘The 

Dialectical Interchange between Socrates and Agathon’, Antichthon 28 (1994), pp. 16–24. 

14 See also R. A. Markus, ‘The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium’ in G. Vlastos (ed.), 

Plato, vol. II (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 138. 

15 See A. Nygren, Eros and Agape (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953); Vlastos, ‘The 

Individual’; Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness; I. Singer, The Nature of Love, 3 vols., (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1984); R. C. Solomon, Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor (New 

York: Doubleday, 1981). 

16 See Markus, ‘The Dialectic of Eros’; F. M. Cornford, ‘The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s 

Symposium’ in W. K. C. Guthrie, The Unwritten Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1950); J. Brentlinger (ed.), The Symposium of Plato (New Haven: University of Massachusetts 

Press, 1970). References to Brentlinger in this paper are to the version in C. Williams (ed.), On Love 

and Friendship (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1995), pp. 157–66.


17 Eros and Agape. 

18 Ibid., p. 76. 

19 Nature of Love, vol. I, p. 89. 

20 In Williams (ed.), On Love and Friendship, p. 165, note 3. 

21 ‘The Individual’, p. 31. 

22 Ibid., p. 32. 

23 In Williams (ed.), On Love and Friendship, pp. 159–60. 

24 It might be thought, however, that this argument does not do the work it needs to do in the 

case of loving another person because while (for the most part) one pint of Guinness is substitutable 

for any other pint of Guinness, our intuitions about loving other persons do not allow for such easy 

replaceability. Later in the article I will show that there are other factical aspects to a love relation 

with another person which escape this difficulty. Nevertheless, for the moment it will suffice to 

argue that the Platonic theory is not incompatible with the idea that the instantiation of qualities 

requires an attachment not just to the qualities but also to the objects within which they inhere. 

25 R. Scruton, Sexual Desire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). 

26 R. Brown, Analyzing Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106–7. 

27 See S. Leighton, ‘What We Love’, pp. 152–3. 

28 A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 

p. 44. 

29 Ibid. 

30 Ibid., p. 45. 

31 Ibid., p. 48. 

32 ‘Platonic Love’, p. 159. 

33 Ibid. 

34 See Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness. It is also perhaps worth noting that there is an attempt 

to spell out something of what loving persons involves, within (contra Nussbaum) the general 

metaphysics adumbrated in the Symposium, in Plato’s Phaedrus. However I cannot argue this issue 

here.

PLATO AND THE LOVE OF INDIVIDUALS

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