Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

4. Forms and Erotic Passion

66 4 Forms and Erotic Passion In the dialogues examined thus far Socrates believes that if we can recognize the mistakes we make in judgments about what is good for us, we shall be able to take due care of our souls. But why do we make such mistakes? Is it that we are stupid or misled by the conventions of our flawed societies or by wicked Sophists—which would suggest a purely intellectual weakness—or is it that we are more specifically deluded by bodily pleasures and desires? And if bodily desires are a large part of the problem, what happens to them when we recognize and act upon our new moral knowledge? In the Gorgias (500e), the Charmides (167e) and the Protagoras (340a), admittedly with limited fanfare, Plato has made an important distinction between rational willing, directed at the good or what we suppose to be our good, and desire (epithumia), which aims at pleasure or satisfaction. Thus far I have largely left such questions aside— though just glancing at the uncertain relationship between pleasure and knowledge—in pursuit of Socrates’ thesis that we can correct our moral mistakes if we submit the logic of our behavior and beliefs to cross-examination. Even in the Meno, which sums up much of Plato’s earlier writing and introduces radically new ideas about the nature of knowledge, the emotional side of our characters and its possibly necessary adaptation to the demands of the philosophical life are left aside. 67 Forms and Erotic Passion Nevertheless, Plato had drawn an “erotic” picture of Socrates in the Charmides, where it is male beauty that attracts him: unsurprisingly in Athenian society, where homosexual relations between an older man and a youth—preferably at puberty but before his beard has fully developed—are a conventional rite of passage, at least among the aristocracy. And that sort of relationship is to prove especially significant both in the Lysis and in the Symposium because it was unequal and substantially nonreciprocal. The active elder male plays a socially accepted role in seeking gratification; the youth is supposed to be captured only with difficulty and after tireless courtship . He is the object sought, the object of pleasure. He is supposed to be passive, not to seek pleasure himself; indeed to do so would be shameful. In an often-cited passage of his alternative Symposium (8.21) the historian Xenophon, who here and elsewhere developed his banal portrait of Socrates, explains the social situation as follows : “The boy does not share the man’s pleasure in intercourse, as a woman does; while himself is cold sober he sees the other drunk with sexual desire.” In the Charmides Socrates is overwhelmed by the sight of Charmides ’ beautiful body (155d), but turns the conversation to the state of his soul—as is appropriate in a dialogue about self-control. Yet the historical Socrates is consistently said to have been an erotikos, a passionate lover, as was noted not only by Plato, but also by Xenophon , Aeschines of Sphettus, and other of his followers. “Urban myths” were constructed around this characterization: thus a certain physiognomist named Zopyrus, according to Phaedo in a largely lost dialogue of the same name, came to Athens and, judging from his appearance, pronounced Socrates a lecher. This aroused mockery , not least from Alcibiades, the would-be seducer of Socrates according to the Symposium, but Socrates himself remarked that he had strong natural tendencies that way and had overcome them with the help of reason. All Socratics connected Socrates’ eroticism with his passion for philosophy, and Plato was soon to set about explaining why this was both natural and necessary. 68 Forms and Erotic Passion Before the Lysis, a small and difficult (even confused) dialogue largely about philia, a word normally and rather reductively translated as “friendship,” Plato had made no attempt to explain the redirection of erotic desire as the emotional motivation for philosophy. Thus the Lysis sets the stage for more elaborate theorizing in the Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus, much of its more constructive material marking it out especially as an early draft of many of the ideas of the Symposium. With its references to “eristic” (204a, 211b) and “logic-choppers” (216a), it also bears comparison with the Meno and the Euthydemus, and is probably of roughly similar date, though with very different subject matter. For Plato had increasingly come to believe that the “Socratic...