4 What Did Socrates Love? Tomáš Hejduk

At the very beginning of the history of philosophy we find Socrates saying that the only thing he really knows is love.1 Nevertheless, scholars remain unclear about exactly what knowledge of love Socrates was claiming to possess. This chapter draws upon the Lysis , Symposium , and Phaedrus to identify the object of Socrates’s love and the rationale for his endorsement of a curiously modified traditional pederasty. 2 The first section shows that the object of Socrates’s love cannot be identified with the objects of various desires instantiated in the individual parts of the soul. The second section demonstrates that Socrates loves the other as a divine being and that his love involves both ‘need love’ and ‘bestowal love.’ The final section attempts to show that, in the strongest sense of Socrates’s erôs , the true object of his love is love itself. At the outset, we may do well to acknowledge that if we want to under- stand the idea of love in a human life, we have to remember the original experience from which it was born. All thoughts and conceptions analyzed here represent a conceptually more accurate elaboration of an old idea of love, though necessarily at the expense of some wider dimensions of the life experience within which it originates. Our return to Socrates recalls some lost dimensions of the original experience. More specifically, the life of love, (the right kind of love) is life in the presence of the god. Conceptions of dialogical love, love at first sight, the irreplaceability of the beloved, and so on acquire their fundamental context from this.

1 The plurality of the objects of ‘love’: parts of soul

When Socrates analyzes the sense of ‘love’ in the Phaedrus , he uses the famous image of the charioteer and two horses to represent the three parts of soul – reason, spirit, and appetite. 3 Each part longs for its own

56 C. Maurer et al. (eds.), Love and Its Objects © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014 What Did Socrates Love? 57 proper object. The black horse or the appetitive element (in the terms of the Republic ) longs for bodily pleasure (sexual satisfaction) or profit. In the Symposium , the appetite is a physically oriented passion that can assert itself only on the lowest rung of the ladder of love and only before the human being starts an erotic ascent.4 By contrast, the white horse, or spirited element in the Phaedrus , longs for honor, victory, and good reputation. In terms drawn again from the Symposium , this is a spiritual love which looks toward beautiful activities and laws. Meanwhile, the charioteer or the rational element longs for contemplation. But the situ- ation is difficult because contemplation, which reason apparently longs for, excludes ruling the whole soul or the whole human being or even the whole polis as a community of persons. After all, to devote oneself to the tasks of ruling , of government, means to resign from the desired contemplation of ideas and instead preoccupy oneself – out of necessity, not of love – with earthly matters .5

2 The whole person: love for the other

From the range of Socrates’s dialogues on love, and with the aid of succes- sive dramatic and analytic readings, we can infer claims about love for the whole soul and for a whole person. Such love never reduces to the listed desires of the individual parts of soul (Phaedrus ) or to the individual stages and channeling, or cathecting, of psychic desires (Symposium ). The object of such love cannot be identified easily with a body, profit, honor, beauty, or good. Rather, its object is simply a beautiful boy in whom all of love’s longings (all the parts or stages) somehow meet (Obdrzalek 2012, p. 78). This love for a boy has a good deal to tell us about the real object of Socrates’s love and about his recommendations concerning the role of love in human life:6 ‘After all, the lover himself cannot become immortal except by giving birth in the beauty he has at last found. He does that, however, precisely by arranging for his beloved to grow up, become truly virtuous, and be with him in the contemplation of ... true beauty’ (Reeve 2011, p. 16). In this sense, Vlastos concisely describes the difference between the Socrates’s and Plato’s love: ‘So what he [Socrates, T.H.] loves in a beautiful boy, is a beautiful boy’ (1991, p. 38). What this tells the reader is that the whole of the soul’s longing is more than just a set of parts. Naturally when answering the question ‘What does it mean to love a beautiful boy?’ we can turn to the analysis of the three parts and answer that the lover always loves the three proper objects of desire that the boy instantiates. This will, however, not be all or even the most important part of the story because the reverse 58 Tomáš Hejduk is also true: the longings of the individual parts of soul can make sense only in the context of a very personal love. This is the thesis explored and supported below.

2.1 The open admirer: Socrates’s need love In passages of the Phaedrus where the reader might expect a speech on beauty and on the other objects that fall within the range of the chari- oteer’s and the philosopher’s longing for contemplation and truth, it is curious but clear that love for the boy himself still remains central. Socrates at length describes the concord and bliss of affectionately living with others (256a–257a). And, after the end of the palinode, he then prays to Erôs,7 ‘Grant that I may be held in higher esteem than ever by those who are beautiful’ (para tois kalois timion einai, 257b). 8 The philosopher’s erotic art ( techné erotiké) and love of those who are beautiful ( hoi kaloi ) both depend upon the favor of the beautiful and simultaneously aid in its evocation. What does such true love for boys look like, according to the Socratic art of love? It seems to stand or fall with the art of seeing. The boy by his character resembles the god, and the true lover is the one who can see the similarity and come to properly worship the boy as he would the god. Socrates (both in his teaching and life) is not far from Simone Weil’s view that ‘love sees what is invisible.’ Socrates polemizes against traditional pederasty in which the boy has to accept a subordinate passive position and satisfy the lover. Instead of love, he is allowed to experience maximally a certain form of friendship with the lover. Socrates attacks the asymmetry here, the imbalance of relationship: it does not truly bring any satisfaction to the boy who is consumed by the lover as by a predator (Charmides 155d–e; Phaedrus 241d1) or by the community where the boy is accepted through the act of subordination. Socrates, by contrast, associ- ates the boy with a god to whom the lover is in many respects subordinate and obliged. Socrates proclaimed what Gaita perceives as the nature of true love: ‘Treat me as a human being, fully as your equal, without conde- scension’ (Gaita 2000, p. xx). In Socrates’s time, children – specifically boys – were ‘invisible to the moral faculties of their fellows’ (Gaita 2000, p. xx). But Socrates recognized the wealth (the divinity on which alone one can base humanity) that was within them. Socrates’s fear for loss of the expertise in love (257a) is then the fear for the loss of sight (243a). And this too shows that love for Socrates is what enables the lover to see divine preciousness of the young.9 Worshiping boys, then, involves care for godly character and for its development both in the beloved and in oneself (252c–253c). 10 In other words, ‘those who are beautiful,’ whose favor Socrates cares to keep, are What Did Socrates Love? 59 both boys and gods themselves. Theirs is the greater part of beauty. These erotic passages also identify the highest goal of life as proclaimed by Socrates: be pleasing to the gods and imitate them (homoiôsis theôi kata to dynaton ).11 Even in the most perfect love (that is, the philosopher’s), the love in question is not only about the charioteer’s contemplation of the true being. It concerns also a relationship with the gods and the imitation of the gods. This is indicated not only by Socratic description of the unceasing worry of the true lover, and his beloved’s similarity to the god, but it is a pattern and background to such worry. The god who is the cause of all this in the end turns his attention away from himself, and in doing so represents at least in the same strength contemplation as care for the world. And this is something for which neither charioteer nor any part of the soul obviously longs. The object of Socrates’s love in this sense is the god as an infinite source of inspiration. The philosopher thus represents a kind of need love, which is in fact a love for the prudential wisdom that enables a human being to live well (Rudebusch 2009, p. 187). This might seem to indicate that love for the boy is primarily or covertly an egocentric desire to reach harmony in one’s own life. However, leading a balanced, meaningful life as such implies mutuality as an imitation of the gods – mutuality between people, gods, and the whole of the world. Indeed, to be similar to the god together with others is the goal for this world.12 Love does not deprive the soul of gravity; it does not transfer the lover from this world into a world of pure form or pure being. There is only a ‘painful growth of the feather’ (252b). The ideas (or ‘forms’) do not take care of anything naturally and thus do not lead a charioteer striving for them back to people. The god, not these ideas, must be the benchmark for Socrates. Sedley (1999) indicates the same, albeit in a wider context, when he points out that for Socrates, ‘the measure of justice is not the idea of justice but god.’ While we long to imitate gods, and they are our measure, we long to contemplate ideas, but there is nothing to imitate. Therefore we think that ‘the whole man’ must necessarily reproach the neglect of earthly matters in the moments of contemplation. Socrates as a man looks with hope to the gods as the ideals of just, harmonious, or virtuous living. He does not look to true being like the charioteer. He may ‘love,’ look up to, and pursue Zeus, Apollo, or Erôs, but only in a mediated way through boys who stand proxy for these gods. It is impossible to imagine a similarly ‘exciting’ or ‘leading’ relationship toward a colorless, shapeless, and intangible idea (247c). The charioteer, and perhaps Plato as well, sees the goal of love (the telos of the feathers and wings) as achieving true being, and love thus takes the 60 Tomáš Hejduk nature of a mere tool. For Socrates, by contrast, the love itself as a form of mutuality with the god is the goal.13 Socrates is not concerned with a god-cre- ator but with a god ideal and guardian of world order, that is, a god who can be imitated. As in the Apology , where Socrates also speaks of philosophy as a service to the god, so in the erotic passages: serving the god (latreia ) means a strenuous acquisition of his virtues. In the case of love and friendship, such acquisition principally involves acquiring the ability to be generous and open to one another and to the ‘treasures’ hidden inside us. 14 Socrates reaches this same conclusion in successive dialogues. The Lysis shows that a friendship between two people cannot be a direct relationship but is conditioned by mutuality with the gods. Many assert that the third angle of the love triangle is the good, nonetheless, in the Lysis (and similarly in the Phaedrus ), love concerns what is familiar to us or our own ( oikeios ), therefore gods and not ideas. The goal of love can be called agathon ( Symposium ) and eudaimonia ( Lysis ), but it is about what one thinks by this, that is, a life similar to the gods. In other words, only gods or Socrates and other ‘perfect beings’ (perfectly striving for wisdom) here on earth can by their behavior give living meaning to terms or conceptions such as goodness or wisdom (see Gaita 2000, p. 3). Socrates’s favored hypothesis of the Lysis and the Symposium , that only the not good not bad (NGNB) can be friends, and only to the good ( Lysis 216e7–217a2; Symposium 205d and so on), give sense in this way: one can love man, but only the good one. Nevertheless, no one is good by himself but only by participating in good (and beauty; see Phaedrus 255c) ‘flowing’ between good (beautiful) creatures. That is, Socrates’s lover is filled with the good (openness) but at the same time extends it further and by this imitates god in his giving love. In the Symposium , similarly to the Lysis , Diotima’s love story ‘is not about a lover who abandons the individual boys he loves, but about someone who comes to love boys successfully by coming to love some- thing else as well’ (Reeve 2011, p. 14). The contact with the ‘divine’ is necessary both for the lift-off of the lover and also because of the hindrances to valuing his beloved appropriately. In other words, contact with the divine is necessary to appreciate the beloved in all salient respects, to see not only his physical beauty but also his spiritual being, thereby enriching the relationship with the beloved to the highest degree, incorporating it into a greater whole.

2.2 The unstinting tutor: Socrates’s gift love The preceding analysis of Socrates’s need love, the love underlying an active acceptance of divine gifts, suggests that it is not only the need What Did Socrates Love? 61 love of the philosopher but also, from the nature of the divine gifts, giving love.15 The gifts in question imply mutuality and generosity, and the recipient in turn may distribute them further. The lover takes care of the beloved and thereby takes part in care for the world. The lover, analogically to Zeus and his arranging of the cosmos (diakosmei 246e), fashions ( katakosmei 252d7) the beloved and with the aid of the art of love (itself a divine gift) fashions (kosmioi ontês 256b) his own life and that of the beloved. In this way he gives the boy gifts that are similar to those god (or the god, in the sense of some god) has given to him. Following the model of god he does not seize the boy; instead he rein- forces and develops his beauty and divine character. 16 Apart from other character similarities to the god, the lover evokes love in the boy (anterôs 255e) and by this means, in the end, they both imitate the generous behavior of the gods. The boy thus develops other spiritual dimensions of life and ideally moves toward the philosophical life (256a–b). The dramatic content of the dialogues reinforces this analysis. Socrates is always concerned with the ‘educational transformation’ of the boy whether the eponymous Phaedrus ( Phaedrus ) or the youngsters from the Lysis or from the Symposium are in question. But the tragic nature and irony of Socrates’s giving love lies in the fact that Socrates himself can never become a pleasant lover or even a friend. In the dialogues, his erôs lies in a preparatory lowering of the beloved so that the latter is humbled. Although from the long-term perspective or the perspective of the whole, Socrates’s love and friendship are unselfish, and ungrudging, and although it brings the greatest good and happiness (agathon , eutychia 244a, 245b, 256b), it is almost (and perhaps more than almost ) unbear- able (see the famous testimony of Alcibiades in the Symposium ): ‘The educator, whose goal is to make students good and wise, cannot – despite being self-ironical – be a pleasant friend. Being a genuine educator ... he asks difficult questions, corrects and supervises the students.’17 In the Phaedrus , both thematically and at the dramatic level of the Phaedrus- Socrates relationship, the lover is pleasant to the beloved only seemingly . He shows only his best side, his divinity. But in doing so he reveals the insufficiency of the self-centred boy. Socrates as lover impersonates a generous, giving love only in the paradoxical sense of transferring to others what they do not want; he enables them to get to know their insufficiency but also shows a demanding way out of this distress (Lysis 210e). Rudebusch (2009) defines such Socratic love as ‘a religious benev- olence towards other human beings.’ God commands Socrates to turn nonphilosophers toward philosophy: one cannot do anything better for the other ( Apology 29d–30a). The philosopher himself is ‘suffering’ from 62 Tomáš Hejduk needy love for the god’s wisdom, which he can never satisfy (Apology 23a). Nonetheless, he is so pervaded by the god and the god’s char- acter that he masters the gift love as a religious duty (Apology 23b, 37e). Rudebusch (with reference to Lysis 218a–b) asserts that it is philoso- pher’s duty to make NGNB people out of bad people. He points out that Socrates perceives his religious duty and ‘his greatest conceivable happiness’ (Apology 41c3–4) to be the transformation of people from not knowing to knowing. Nonetheless, the latter is perhaps better thought of as a change from worse to better (for example, by broadening their physical into spiritual virtues) or less mature to more mature rather than a change from bad to neither good nor bad. As we have shown, Socrates develops something that is already there in the beautiful one: this guides his selection of those he will ‘tempt.’ If they were bad to begin with, they simply would not listen to him. By humbling the beloved, Socrates refuses to comply with any reason- able idea of friendship or with some traditional scheme of helping friends and harming enemies, or (later) with Aristotle’s concept of friendship. In this sense it is not a problem that Socrates rids the youth of self-esteem and personal dignity (McCormick 2007), because he offers them the creation of a better self. Love, then, is about the transformation rather than loss of self. Similarly it is about the transformation of self-respect: as the beloved, we come to value something else about ourselves. In this sense it is not true that Socrates would not be a beneficial friend and that he would intentionally harm the beloved and friends. The critics are more correct about Socrates promising something which he knows in advance that he will not deliver (he knows what boys expect, based on his behavior, but he disappoints their expectations). And that is what a true friend does not do. It can be excused by appeal to the possibility of genuine choice: Socrates’s deceptive means enable the boy to be brought to experience the divine, and only after this can the boy ‘freely’ opt for the life informed by the divine. But until one has a clearer idea of this (divine, philosophical) possibility, one can hardly offer the possibility of decision. Such a method, the method of a trickster, is acceptable without reser- vations in parental love and nobody doubts that it is love or friendship. But Socrates rids it of the limitation to family members and (copying Zeus) widens it to all those striving for virtue: he feels parental love as an educator to all his foster children (just like anyone who can help on the way to wisdom and living well). 18 The difficulties associated with this love are compensated for by its tracking of the good and blissful life. Moreover, as Lysias’s speech and Socrates’s first speech in the Phaedrus What Did Socrates Love? 63 show, numerous and often fundamental difficulties (maliciousness, importunity, flattering, and so on) are connected with common love and envy plays a central role here (Phaedrus 239ab, 240a).

3 Love itself as the object of love

3.1 Aporia (the Lysis ) and the ‘middle position’ of erôs (the Symposium ) The boy-god, informed by the divine, is not the only object of Socrates’s love. A similarly respectable object of love is the love itself. Socrates apparently loves to fall in love (Carson 1986). The evidence here is first the aporetic dialogues such as in the Lysis , when Socrates demonstrates to Hippothalos how to speak to the beloved but does not employ anything other than an elenctic examination of the beloved (Lysis 206c ff.). Such examinations do not lead to big results. The beloved is left in puzzle- ment (aporia ), but the result is an awakening of the longing for other speeches, arguments, and counter-arguments. Simply stated, Socrates’s speeches induce or reinforce – since Lysis is already in love with wisdom when he meets Socrates (213d) – love (for wisdom). In this sense, in the Symposium it is said that Erôs (who is identified with the philoso- pher, 204b) lacks wisdom, but he can fight with this insufficiency and poverty (endeia, aporia) and overcome them. This is a different sign, a sign of non-destitution, of resourcefulness (euporia ) in thinking of ways to acquire what he lacks (204b, 203d4–7).19 Erôs, just like Socrates, is condemned to tricks and scheming (204d) in an unceasing dialectic of reaching for the unattainable: ‘In one and the same day he comes alive and flourishes, then he dies, later still back again reviving as his father’s nature asserts itself again. But his resources are always running out, so that Erôs is never either totally destitute or affluent. Similarly, he is midway between wisdom and ignorance’ ( Symposium 203b–204c). In this sense, nobody can expect more from Socrates’s philosophy than love itself: ‘Socrates may be the master of foreplay, of arousing desire, and may to that extent be a master of the art of love, but when it comes to satisfying desire, he is a failure’ (Reeve 2011, p. 3). To satisfy desire is something different than satisfying erôs . There is no other satisfaction of Socrates’s love but further love, that is, continuing love. And because of this, sometimes it is just Socrates who tries harder and harder to find an argument against his own conclusions, even when the latter sound good to his friends. When it comes to satisfying both love and cogni- tion, Socrates is no failure. In fact, he is completely successful. But the satisfaction on offer means staying face to face with the beloved (or 64 Tomáš Hejduk with the object of cognition) without being absorbed by him: the gap in between them is the place where it is possible to live, possible to develop conceptions and ideas, and possible to find beauty or let truth emerge (Carson 1986, p. 62).

3.2 The uniqueness and irreplaceability of love Socrates’s emphasis on love being the way to another love is the strongest proof of Socratic love for love itself. One dimension of this is the inducing not of erôs but of anterôs in the beloved (as shown above). A second dimension is the presence of love in friendship that grows from it. Here I suppose that in Socrates’s concept of philia (friendship), which follows after the period of ecstatic love, elements of erôs are still present and important. Because of them, it is a unique sort of friendship.

3.2.1 Anterôs Socrates shows that love cannot simply be answered by philia , cannot be put together with sober friendship. He shows it perhaps most explicitly in the palinode in the Phaedrus , where the answer of the beloved boy to the lover’s erôs is not traditional philia but unconventionally anterôs : ‘He has a mirror image of love in him – ‘backlove’ – though he neither speaks nor thinks of it as love, but as friendship’ (255de). That is what Socrates wants from love – anterôs , which is similar to his combative, but unstinting love. Traditionally anterôs represents reciprocity or mutu- ality in the case of women, but also emulation and rivalry in the case of men. The same example of the surprised beloved and the challenge to emulate him is described by Alcibiades in the Symposium. Socrates is described as ‘seeming to be a lover while really establishing himself as a beloved boy instead’ (222b). Similarly, in the Parmenides , where Socrates as an adolescent youth, and thus a potential paidika , introduces himself to Zeno and Parmenides, he is marked by erotic vehemence and ‘emula- tion’ (Gordon 2010).

3.2.2 Lysias versus Socrates (the Phaedrus ) Holding erôs also in friendship that originates in a love affair can be well demonstrated through the contrast of Socrates’s approach to love with Lysias’s approach in the Phaedrus . Lysias advocates the supremacy of prudential friendship above love. He recommends sexual intercourse and all the advantages eroticism can bring, without falling in love but through a prudent deal. The affection of those who are not in love is, in his opinion, better in terms of the reciprocity and stability which it guarantees. It does not matter at all that it is an economic deal which What Did Socrates Love? 65 yields reciprocity which reduces life to business or trade: do, ut des . With his cold reasonable arguments he can succeed against the crazy lover because the boy is, in the familiar asymmetrical scheme, also on the side of reason and philia . The boy is conspicuously not infatuated and complies with the lover only because he knows that this is how he can ensure advancement within the social hierarchy. Some scholars have accepted Lysias’s viewpoint as traditional. Notoriously, Adkins argues that the behavior of the lover is correctly shown by Lysias to be hazardous to public safety. Taking the advice or offer of the sober nonlover would increase the amount of philia and diminish the amount of strife in any city (Adkins 1996, p. 235). Yet Socrates rejects relationships without love (mê erôntos oikeiotês ) as a substitute for love. He rejects Lysias’s case for the inadvisability of love because business-like language in this context is improper – it is ‘alloyed with mortal prudence and follows mortal and parsimonious rules of conduct, which will beget narrowness in the beloved soul.’ Simply put, the whole life and conductive sôphrosynê (wisdom) cannot be reduced to economic calculation. We must take the soul and the gods into account when we examine the way that love distinctively enriches human life. Adkins asks himself a question, ‘Why does Plato, much of whose philo- sophical energies were expended on advancing the claims of the cooper- ative excellences against those of the competitive excellences, reject with such vehemence the views of Lysias?’ (1996, p. 235). We can answer: he sees love as source of value and of the recognition of value, a recogni- tion of the preciousness of other human beings (which man otherwise hardly gets), and the source of our greatest, deepest happiness and bless- ings (Phaedrus 244a, 245bc, 256e). In short, the objects of Socrates’s love are different from the objects of Adkins’s concern. Wisdom and truth, which is the philosopher’s object, connect people, while the lust for profit and economic benefit is, in the end, the thing that divides them. In the pursuit of truth, beauty, or wisdom, we are not participants in a zero-sum game akin to economic competition. Instead, both parties can win: ‘Truth is a paradigm of a non-zero-sum good ... because the mere fact that A comes to possess a given truth does not mean that B has less of it’ (Williams 2005, p. 155). Self-satisfaction in the context of such a love is not at the expense of others and the polis . The way of love – to answer to Adkins – is also the very important power to create strong bonds between human beings. According to the palinode, it is in the experience of love that we can meet with unstinting generosity, with values that will otherwise be missing in the life of humans (see especially aphthonia at 247a, 253b). Nobody is 66 Tomáš Hejduk ever so dedicated to the beloved as the lover. The friendship of the lover is more forceful than other friendships (255b). And the objection that such love lasts only for a short time does not then stand because this is precisely where lifelong friendship is found (256ab): ‘The Phaedrus myth’s account of erôs stresses, in contrast to Lysias and Socrates’ first speech, that erôs can be an element in – can indeed give rise to and help sustain – a long-lasting, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial relationship’ (Cairns 2013, p. 236). In a dramatic reading of the palinode, Socrates is very generous: he not only pays for the fines (bill settlement) but gives something extra, unex- pected, ‘as great as divine gifts’ (dôreô , 256e3, 257a4; cf. 244a). Whereas the companionship of people without love (Lysias) is conducted by ‘human self-control’ (sôphrosynê thnêtê, 256e) and ‘all it pays are cheap, human dividends,’ the Socrates’s companionship is that of the unstinting lover ( sôphrosynê erotikê; hê para erastou philia, 256e, 257a). Here we are not in the territory of the charioteer or the intellectually capable, contem- plating philosopher on the one hand, or the barbarian, the common man clinging to a physical world on the other hand. Rather, Socrates draws a different contrast between the friend without love (consumed by a careful distribution of material property) and the loving friend, erotic mutuality and the horizon which offers a glimpse of the lives of the gods. Within this horizon love is ‘fascination, which takes a form of ‘hyperbole,’ which gradually overcomes also our boldest expectations and hopes and offers something ... about which we had no idea. Each step upward, which is enabled by love, opens before the soul other new, unthought-of possibilities’ (Špinka 2009, p. 140). The philia of Lysias – and probably of all traditional pederasty – denotes only succursal love, in which feelings or affections are rather protective (insurable), and so it denotes closeness, whereas erôs represents passionate inspiration, verve, and openness. Erôs unites people in order to love yet something else, let us say something transcendent – beauty itself, truth, wisdom – in a sense never fully attainable by earthlings. In other words, the shift in the palinode is a shift from the moral and social to the divine nature of love itself: ‘Don’t you believe that Love is the son of Aphrodite? Isn’t he one of the gods?’ (242d). By this a new, optimistic, and meaningful attitude toward the mania of erôs opens. It is only additionally that this divine erôs shows himself to be beneficial to man or important from moral point of view. The moral and institutional aspects of erôs are a poor imitation of his divine nature. 20 Only from divine point of view is erôs morally and socially obliging. Therefore it cannot be either reduced to morality and the service to the What Did Socrates Love? 67 society or explained and evaluated in this respect: ‘Erôs is not institu- tional. To reduce it to a contract or a marital duty means to insult it. Its natural bond is not analyzable as a ‘duty – debt.’ Its law which just ceases being law, is the mutuality of a gift. It is infra-legal, para-legal, supra-legal. Therefore it is essential to him by its nature that it endan- gers institutions by its demonism. Each institution including marriage’ (Ricoeur 1960, p. 8). Reciprocity and cooperation thus remain present but not economic and in this sense self-centered or acquisitive. By this interpretation, the life and the doctrines of Socrates indicate an entirely non-egoistic eudaimonism: ‘Self-benefit does not count for Socrates as a deliberative criterion at all’ (Abhel-Rappe 2012, p. 322). Socrates also describes his ‘desire to benefit all human beings,’ which includes himself, but ‘this self-benefit is not a part of the consultative model that Socrates invokes when he explains why he engages in philosophical activity’ (Abhel-Rappe 2012, p. 323). Socrates’s love is a form of a dispen- sation from the gods, a form of theia moira or latreia , of service to the god ( Apology 23c; cf. Abhel-Rappe, 2012, pp. 326–30). The reduction of erôs to the desires of individual parts of the soul is similarly absurd if we come back to the beginning of our text. As soon as we explained divine inspiration as a secondary reaction to the lust for another, for self-satisfaction, or a blissful life, we would also reduce it to human, earthly matters, and there would not be any reason to talk about it. It would be redundant; its objects would be identical to the objects of named lusts. Love of an individual, accidentally hit by Erôs’s arrow (and let us remember that Erôs’s arrow does not care about qualities, character, or properties) is the reason that we then long for his proper- ties, his hair, or his acts, as well as for satisfaction. Rather than reducible to localized desires of the soul, the love Socrates is talking about is made up by a religious attitude toward higher powers, a relationship to tran- scendence. And it is this which provides a reasonable explanation of our fidelity to a particular other. In this sense, friendship must not be an evaluative criterion of love, but on the contrary love and its divine generosity is to be a criterion of friendship. And so, in contrast to Lysias’s speech, Socrates denies the very possibility of soundly evaluating love from the economic point of view (position after love). Socrates is asking us to imagine that love expresses the very life we are living in a more substantial way, and thus all should be evaluated from its position (‘now’) rather than from the position of an economist (‘then’), a position which would treat it only as a tool, some- thing to serve life merely as aiding force (Carson 1986, p. 124). Socrates from this point of view does not strive for Phaedrus, or for any other 68 Tomáš Hejduk beloved. He strives for the beloved not to sink into small-mindedness but live in enthusiastic upheaval. And while the strong, peculiar, and detailed concept of erôs which Socrates develops implies it cannot ever be completely sublimed or transformed into friendship, this upheaval nonetheless (co)creates friendship. Erôs co-creates the content of friend- ship because friendship born out of love continues to have the specific properties of love albeit adapted to a new lifelong context. 21

Notes

1 . Symposium 177a; cf. Phaedrus 257a; Lysis 204c; Theag . 128b. 2 . There are, of course, problems with this approach – mainly the fact that in the Phaedrus and Symposium , Plato’s concept of love is more evident than Socrates’s concept. However, if we stick with what conforms to the Socrates of the early dialogues, the dialogues of the middle period can reveal more about his concept of love. 3 . This nonproblematized identification of the tripartite model from the Phaedrus , Symposium , and Republic is a simplification. But we hope that even such a minimal, simplified scheme might be helpful. On the tripartite of soul see, for example, Obdrzalek (2012) and Renaut (2013). 4 . The role of the black horse is not only evil here, but without it there would not be any meeting with the boy nor recollection of the beauty. Methodologically, it is important that the palinode describes the psychological movement of an individual before an upheaval as such begins, while the upheaval of the Symposium begins where the description from the Phaedrus ends: it is not a description of the struggle between psychic parts, but a take-off of an indi- vidual and nonproblematized soul upward. In the Phaedrus a soul gains feathers in the end, it does not fly anywhere: it is a transformation of sexual lust to higher aspirations, but still within the range of a joint venture of two earthlings. See, for example, Moore (1973), Dillon (1973), Santas (1988), and Nussbaum (1986). 5 . See, for example, Obdrzalek (2012), p. 82. On the contrary, about the desire not only to get to know but also to govern, see Cooper (1984). 6 . In the Symposium , the aim of the speech presented by Socrates is clarifica- tion of loving boys correctly ( to orthôs paiderastein 211b; cf. Republic 403a: ho orthôs erôs). In the Lysis , Socrates leads a dialogue in order to instruct boys in how to love one another duly, that is, how to talk to each other in a way that gives sense to love (Symposium 204e–205a) or how to become a friend of one another (from 212a). In the Phaedrus , Socrates leads the search for a meaningful love in the lives of human beings. 7 . We distinguish between ‘Erôs’ the god and ‘ erôs ’ the affection, that is, erotic love. 8 . Here I use the 1995 translation of Plato’s Phaedrus by Nehamas and Woodruff. Other translations are my own. 9 . For Socrates’s polemics with traditional pederasty, see Vlastos (1991), p. 39. 10 . Phaedrus 259ab, 273d–274a. Against this is the fact that, apart from favor or disfavor of the gods, Socrates nowhere speaks of the gods being able to What Did Socrates Love? 69

experience anything like interhuman mutual interpersonal love. Nor does he speak about the role that a similar relation with gods would play for the souls of the loving who get rid of the body. See Obdrzalek (2012), p. 91ff., which concludes that the most perfect existence does not experience interpersonal love but nonetheless implies ‘benevolent care for the cosmos.’ 11 . In Phaedrus , see 273e–274a, 259ab, 257a, and passages from the palinode where the lover tries to appeal to the beloved. Also remember the lyricist’s ‘boys are our gods.’ 12 . See Sedley 1999. Similarly in the Symposium (202e–204c), Erôs is not the god but a daimôn , a creature closer to man than – in comparison with ideas – the gods named in the Phaedrus . In this sense one can say that Socrates follows the footsteps of Erôs (rather than Zeus, Phaedrus 252e), which places him between ignorance and wisdom (202a). 13 . Apart from the already mentioned references, cf. Symposium 212a: theophiles . 14 . For unstinted philosophising: Symposium 210d; for unenvious gods as idols of human souls and unenvying love: Phaedrus 247a, 253b; for Socrates serving the god: Apology 29d–30a. Cf. Sedley (1999), who identifies serving the god with acquiring virtue. 15 . About the notion of gift, see Phaedrus 244a, 256e. More generally for Socrates’s philosophy and erôs as primarily other-regarding agency, see Abhel-Rappe (2012). 16 . In previous speeches in Phaedrus , love is conversely (probably as a reflection and critique of traditional pederasty) described as jealous seizure and holding of the beloved: the goal of this predator’s love is saturation. As wolf loves lamb, so the lover loves his boy (241d). 17 . Jinek (2008), pp. 120, 111–2, as well as Lysis 210e, 206b. 18 . Lysis 207d–210d. Parents hand over prudential wisdom to their children (cf. Apology 20a–c); they aspire for them to be free and happy, but they must first know how to live well as a human being (cf. Euthyd . 282ab). Socrates’s love for boys, as educational, corresponds to this parental love which cannot be reproached for humiliating others. See Apology 20a–c, 29d, 31b, where the philosopher feels affection (aspasmos ) for his fellow citizens and helps them like a father or older brother. 19 . Cf. Sheffield (2006), pp. 61–2. Resourcefulness or ingenuity is a tradi- tional attribute of Erôs: ‘Eros of many devices,’ poikilomêchanos Erôs , Athenaeus,13.609d. 20 . It is necessary to distinguish divinity in strict sense of the word – as perfect, good, and unchangeable – from the divine forces the Greeks perceived in cult and the common life. Erôs -daimôn is a lower emanation of god Erôs, an emanation accustomed to earthly nature and to giving way in a manner distant from perfect divinity. Social institutions and morality belong to the lower emanation – hence their demoniac nature. 21 . This chapter was supported by the grant no. 13–14510S of the Czech Science Foundation ‘Love and Friendship in Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy.’ A first draft was presented at the workshop ‘Love and Its Objects’ in Pardubice, Czech Republic. For the final version, I am most grateful to all three editors, whose care about the volume and contributors to it is a proof of very special sort of love. 70 Tomáš Hejduk

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