Gregory Vlastos 'The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato': first published in Vlastos' Platonic Studies, 1973, Princeton UP.

• Aristotle defines love as "wishing for someone what you believe to be good things--wishing this not for your own sake but for his (or her)--and acting so far as you can to bring them about." P. 137 in Fine's volume.
  
• for the other person's sake
• note: strictly speaking, one could fulfill this definition and have it be the case that one does not value that individual as that individual: one could just want "an individual" to love and not be so concerned that it be "that very individual"
• this is not a "soul mate" idea of love, in other words
• Aristotle is using this definition as a central meaning of "love" around which other related "loves" are focused.
• friendship comes in varieties
  
• true full-on unqualified 'friendship' is for the other person's sake
• does not exclude pleasure and profit
  
• just for mutual profit
• just for mutual pleasure
• just for one-sided pleasure
  
• just for one-sided profit
• sex might mix into it and move it from friend-ship to lover-ship
• but sex and love are not synonymous: being a 'lover' does not necessarily mean loving in this sense.
  
• love for things is another phenomenon
• Vlastos brings in this later-than-Plato definition of friendship as something against which to measure Plato's concept of love
• First, the dialogue Lysis, whose subject is friendship
• the idea there is that a person is loved if, and only if, s/he produces good.
• key question that is not addressed: good for whom?
• is it possible that "good" is nothing but good for all concerned?
• is "good" relative?
• at Lysis 213eff, Plato clearly says that A loves B because A needs a benefit from B and just because of that benefit
• "if one were in want of nothing, one would feel no affection ... and he who felt no affection would not love.' 215b-c
• the "Proton Philon": the thing that is loved for its own sake, not for something else
  
• we love a doctor for health, and we love health for something else, and .... 
• we love money for what it buys, and we love what it buys for something else, and ...
• at the end of the chain, there is something that we love for itself, NOT for something else (or so Plato says)
• what is that thing? Plato says it is "the good"
• the good for any given person is what makes that person a flourishing human (i.e. 'happy')
• there is no further elucidation of "the good" in the Lysis.
  
• Republic:
• the state in the republic is held together by familial love
• the allegory of metals shows an ethos in which everyone feels related to the state as to a parent, just as metals are related to the earth as a mother
• part of the "noble lie"
• everyone comes from the earth
• each person either has an affinity for gold (guardians), silver (thumetic/soldier/military), or bronze (workers)
  
• the guardians should care for the state as their family
• nuclear family is abolished
• children are offspring of a group, not individuals
• no marriage, just mating ceremonies
• all property held in common
• guardians are subjected to an extent to the state's will
• all of this will promote proper love, philia, for the state
  
• non-guardians, producers, are not subjected to these structures
• producers are subjected to the guardians' will
• because the guardians really do know what 'the good' is and the producers do not
• this should promote 'love' philia, says Plato
• consider what the Lysis said: you will be loved if you are useful
• this fits perfectly with the Republic.
• in the Republic, one is loved in so far as, and only in so far as, one produces good for the community as a whole
• Karl Popper, whose book The Open Society and its Enemies is fantastic, calls this "collectivist utilitarianism"
• "Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard [of justice], the interest of the state ... Morality is nothing but political hygiene."
• Popper is not quite true to Plato:
  
• Plato and Socrates both hold that developing one's soul is the highest human goal: moral development.
• The state is to be judged by whether it improves individual human souls.
• consider a consequence: if a guardian ceases to produce good for the community, she is no longer loved, and things like medical treatment would be wasted on her (Rep. 407d-e)
• consider individual freedom under that regime: all privacy and freedom is subject to the state: one's sex life is regulated: singing, writing, speaking are all restricted: democracy disappears
• private pleasure, private pain, etc are all done away with (somehow) in the state: Rep. 462a-b
• surely it is reasonable to think that a friend feels pain when a friend feels pain, and a friend feels pleasure when a friend feels pleasure
• Plato takes that to the extreme: all the guardians share each others' pleasure and pain, and they have no private pleasure or pain that is not shared, because those private feelings act against the unity of the state
• so Plato tells us not to love an individual for that individual's sake alone: an individual is not the proton philon, the thing that is loved for its own sake, not for something else
• the proton philon is the idea, the forms. we are to love them
• Plato uses both filein and eran (the friendly kind of love and the more passionate even physical kind) of this love of ideas: 479e, 501d
• Symposium.
• Diotima's speech clearly speaks of love of ideas
• because the good is good and we think it will make us 'happy'
• mere 'skin-love' for procreation is but a shadow compared to the love that creates ideas or creates via ideas
• the ascent goes through the utilitarian procreational heterosexual to the homosexual to the ideal
• Vlastos calls this the transmuting of the physical in to the imaginative and intellectual
• Ideas
• Plato's ontology
• three sorts of things
1. Forms: transcendant and paradigmatic
2. The Character of the sensed objects which is an instantiation of a given Form
3. Sensed objects: things that may or may not participate in a given Form
• more concretely:
1. The Form Justice
2. The Character justness of that thing.
3. A person or thing that participates in the Form Justice
• Clearly Plato thought 1 and 2 are separate,  distinct from each other: the Form Justice is different from the Character Justness of any given sensed object.
• This distinctness or separateness is not discussed clearly by Plato
• One way to interpret it, which Plato often suggests, is that the Character is imperfectly what the Form is perfectly
• That is treacherous:
• Does the Form "Change" constantly Change? If so, it is not unchanging and stable, and so ... it is not a Form
• Is the Form "Plurality" itself perfectly plural? If so, it is not one, and so it is not unitary, and so ... it is not a Form.
• Self-predication is a big problem for Plato.
• SO, perhaps Plato did not mean for the Forms to be self-predicative?
• Well, that won't work either, because that renders Diotima's speech rather puzzling:
• Why would we be so attracted to the beauty of the Form Beauty? it itself would not be beautiful.
• Plato's theory of Love would not have worked.
• Vlastos' suggestion:
• Proper study of Plato's theory would need to include consideration of the following:
1. Plato was a homosexual
2. Plato was a mystic
3. Plato was a moralist
1. "...a clinical study of the effect which Plato's inversion [i.e. homosexuality] would be likely to have on one who saw anal intercourse as 'contrary to nature' (Phdr. 251a, Laws 636-7), a degradation not only of man's humanity, but even of his animality: even to brutes, Plato believes, 'nature' ordains heterosexual coupling. (Laws 636b) This thought would poison him for sensual gratification with anticipatory torment and retrospective guilt. It would tend to distort his overall view of sexual fulfilment, while leaving him with raw sensitiveness to male beauty and heightening his capacity for substitute forms of erotic response." P. 156 in Fine's Plato 2's version of Vlastos' article
1. NOTE: although we object to the characterization of homosexuality as 'inversion', we might find ourselves not objecting to the overall thesis here, which is that in a highly repressive society, the repressed experience strong pressures on their worlds which have consequences for how they view and react to and interact with the world.
   
2. "... a study which would connect his theory of love with his religious mysticism, exploring the implications of the momentous fact that while Plato retains traditional deities and sets high above them in the Timaeus a creator-god of his own devising, none of these personal divinities stirs either awe or love in his heart, while the severely impersonal Ideas (Forms) evoke both, but especially love, so much so that he speaks repeatedly of communion with them as an act of blissful and fertile conjugal union." P. 156 again
3. Morally
• Things (Forms) evoke love and passion more than persons, in Plato's world.
• This is not at all implausible: we have intense attachments to abstractions such as ideology, reform, revolution, art, science, philosophy, etc.
  
• This kind of love can reach a "mad obsessive intensity" that is as powerful if not more so than physical love: it can certainly affect more people
• Plato puts our desire to create as the driver of all of this: it is not some sort of lust or sexual urge. It's a desire to create in the world. Plato thinks we are driven in all activities that strive for beauty by this hunger to create.
  
• "We see in the Phaedrus what keeps Plato's head clear even when his senses are inflamed. It is the ontology of the paradigm form (i.e. the self-predicative form). That harshly dualistic transcendentalism, which enraged Aristotle by its 'separation' of Forms from things and which nowadays drives analytical philosophers to despair when they try to make logical sense out of it, proves a sterling asset in this area. It sustains a kind of idealism less addicted to the pathetic fallacy than are most other kinds. It makes for a more truthful vision of that part of the world which we are all most tempted to idealize and so to falsify -- the part we love. And it makes for a gain of another, no less important kind: freedom from the tyranny which even the unidealized love object can exercise over a lover. ..." P. 159
• "But a sterling asset may be bought at a heavy cost. Plato's theory floods with the most brilliant light a narrow sector of its theme, and there points the way to authentic spiritual achievement. Beyond those limits the vision fails. Plato is scarcely aware of kindness, tenderness, compassion, concern for the freedom, respect for the integrity of the beloved, as essential ingredients of the highest type of interpersonal love.... It is not said or implied or so much as hinted at that 'birth in beauty' ... should enrich the lives of persons who are themselves worthy of love for their own sake." P. 160
• "... the cardinal flaw in Plato's theory (is that) It does not provide for love of whole persons, but only for love of that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities... persons cannot compete with abstractions of universal significance, like schemes of social reform or scientific and philosophical truths, still less with the Idea of Beauty. (Smp. 211e)." P. 161
• "Here we see the polar opposite of the ideal which has moulded the image of the deity in the Hebraic and Christian traditions: that of a Being whose perfection empowers it to love the imperfect: of a Father who cares for each of his children as they are..." P. 162