From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 381
beauty, with no inkling that shifts of interest between individuals and even
categories are intelligible as exercises of loyalty towards a single common
property. They are aesthetes for whom every art-object is irreplaceable by any
other. Those who make the ascent are different from early on: their hearts rapidly
adjust to generalizations about beauty as a single property that comes in kinds
and degrees. For Plato, this can only mean that, like homing pigeons, they are
already potentially on target to retrieve the Form itself.
How will this effect their attitudes to persons? Their promiscuity will be
unlike that of the indiscriminate lovers mentioned in the Republic who find a
snub nose ‘charming’ and a Roman nose ‘regal’, a dark complexion ‘virile’ and a
fair one ‘divine’ (474d7–e2). Inhabiting an erotic world of thick rather than thin
concepts, of specificities and not abstractions, these find all adolescents attractive
in different ways. The lovers of the Symposium realize that ‘if one must pursue
beauty of appearance, it is great folly not to consider the beauty of all bodies one
and the same’ (210b2–3). So the two promiscuities contrast, for the one depends
on appreciating differences, the other on appreciating identity; the one values all
individuals, while the other values nothing individual. Even at the second level
of the ascent, where the objects of love are souls and mental qualities, there is no
interest in varieties of personality. The right speeches are those ‘that improve the
young’ (c2–3), with no suggestion of the theme in the Phaedrus, which is one of
the links between its treatments of love and rhetoric, that different types of
speech are appropriately directed at different temperaments (271b1–5, c10–d7).
When the ascent is completed, the lover will look down at ‘the wide sea of
beauty’ (Symposium 210d4) at a height from which individuals, and even kinds of
individual, are no longer distinct.
We may then wonder whether the ladder of love is not an exit out of love in
any ordinary sense. It is true that the summit of the ascent is not the end of the
story. In a sexual metaphor, the lover will beget on Beauty ‘not images of virtue
but true virtue’, and so become ‘dear to the gods and, if any man can, immortal
himself also’ (212a3–7). Yet all this contrasts with the kind of immortality
offered before (209c2–d1); there the lover begat on the boy virtues ‘more
beautiful and immortal’ than physical children; here he begets virtue on Beauty
itself so as to become, so far as is humanly possible, immortal in the manner of a
god. The ‘images of virtue’ that the human lover generated in his beloved were
perhaps no more real than those that poets generate in their audience (d1–4); the
philosophical lover may generate ‘true virtue’ only in himself in the form of an
intellectual state that relates him only to the gods. On this reading, a vicarious
immortality dependent on the contingencies of personal relationships is
transcended and replaced by a proprietary immortality that is no longer a child of
chance. Gregory Vlastos concludes, ‘What started as a pederastie idyl ends up in
a transcendental marriage’ ([10.59], 42).
If this egoistic intellectualism is the correct interpretation of the Platonic ascent,
Forms provide not a new motivation towards morality, but a new problem for its
justification. As Vlastos aptly comments, ‘Were we free of mortal deficiency we