that it is not a liberation from the contentious, lustful element
in our souls, but rather a constraining of it. “Having enslaved
that part through which evil attempted to enter the soul,” lover
and beloved become free for contemplation.
According to Socrates in the Phaedrus,the wild, threat-
ening force of sex is “enslaved” by the virtuous man, not de-
stroyed ( 256 b). We are not mixed equally and never will be.
Crucially, though, the friction between the parts of the soul, in
thePhaedrusas in the Republic,leads to the passion that we
need to pursue wisdom. Without passion, without the fight of
the higher against the lower impulses, we would never seek
love—or philosophical knowledge. For Socrates, love, like phi-
losophy, expresses the restless contention of a divided self. This
is what Socrates means when he says that philosophy is the
work of eros, amazing and frightening in what it reveals. In
both love and philosophy, the fight within us shows us who,
and what, we are. And we are more surprising to ourselves
than we would have thought, resembling the strange creatures
of myth.
In the great set piece of the Symposium, Diotima’s
speech, the rapture of perfect knowledge is intensely yearned
for—and unattainable. Diotima is a mystic witch who in-
structs Socrates in the ways of desire that animate the universe.
In the Symposium,she ends her lecture to the admiring, bewil-
dered sage of Athens with a thrilling climax: five pages of
unrivaled beauty on the pure shining excitement of the Idea.
At the end of Diotima’s speech, we look down from Plato’s
Everest. The whole world lies transfigured below us, now that
we have glimpsed the sheer irresistible beauty of philosophy.
Knowledge is electric, a drive that transforms the world by
launching our whole being toward an ecstatic, tantalizing vi-
sion of beauty.
146 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud