From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 401
the divinely inspired poet. But the paradox is clearly deliberate, and in fact the
overtly crazy behaviour of the philosophical lover is restricted wholly to the first
stage, when he first falls in love, as he supposes with the beloved himself; after
that, he recovers himself, and only appears crazed to the outside world, for
neglecting ordinary concerns. 33 Yet at the same time the context shows that we
are supposed to imagine him still in an ‘inspired’ state, still ‘in love’, since his
mind remains directed towards, among other objects, the one—Beauty—which
originally stirred him to passion. In the Symposium we find what is recognizably
a variant of this picture of the philosopher as lover. Having begun by falling in
love with a particular beautiful individual, he will be led (by a mysterious
guide) 34 ultimately to acknowledge the splendour of the Form from which that
individual and all other beautiful things derive their beauty, and transfer his
allegiance to that.
What emerges with particular clarity from the Phaedrus is that it is reason itself
which longs for Beauty. What is stirred by the vision and the memory of beauty
(and Beauty) is primarily the charioteer himself, though the second horse, from
the philosophical point of view unfortunately, also responds in its own way. In
fact, Plato consistently treats the reasoning part as having its own desires and its
own pleasures. The lower parts of the soul cannot redirect themselves towards
higher objects, since they just are those parts of the soul with which we desire
respectively food, drink, etc., or honour. A horse cannot become a charioteer, nor
can what we might call an instinct, unrefined by thought and reflection (a
description which at least fits the ‘appetitive’ part), be turned into a rational
wish, though both spirit and appetite may be trained to desire and enjoy those
things in their respective spheres which reason determines to be right for them. 35
Of course, any time and energy spent on those things which are attractive to the
lower elements mean less time and energy for higher things, and vice versa; and
this makes it natural for Socrates to use the image of the diversion of a stream, as
he does in the Republic, ‘we recognize, I suppose, that if a person’s desires
incline vigorously towards one thing, they are by this degree weaker in other
directions, like a stream which has been diverted into that other channel’. 36 But
the desires themselves remain distinct. The desire for, and impulse towards,
Beauty and the other Forms, the objects of reason and intellect, must therefore
belong to the reasoning part itself.
In that case the opposition in Plato between rational and irrational is not a
simple one between reason and desire, except in so far as ‘desire’ is identified
with the lower or bodily desires. This point coincides with the consistent way in
which (as we have seen) philosophy is described in the dialogues, as above all a
passionate pursuit. If philosophy is not literally erōs, passionate sexual love,
because that must be directed towards people, it is nevertheless like it, and—so
Socrates claims, on Plato’s behalf—it provides a degree of fulfilment far greater
than what we can expect from ordinary erōs. The way in which the Symposium
puts the philosopher’s goal, as a kind of union with the forms, at first sight suggests
the sublimation of sexual passion. But if that entails the desire for one thing,