Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “Eros can bring out the very best in people and the very worst, and what is being brought out in your partner, BONDAGE, is the very worst of the worst. What has reared up in all its ugly violence is the essence of the tyrant, a lawless person who recognizes no reality beyond the peremptory urges of his own desires.

  “To be sure, within each person, even the best, there are various impulses battling it out with one another, like a chariot that has two horses (Phaedrus 253d). One horse, ill formed and ill groomed, with eyes bloodshot and unfocused, is animated by the spirit of insolence and wanton hubris.6 It wants to go where it wants to go and can barely be restrained with whip or goad. The other horse, well shaped and holding itself with discipline and dignity, is nobly guided by nothing harsher than a word or command. The character of a person is manifested by how it manages the two horses of its chariot. No situation places a greater strain on character than eros, which engorges the urges of the wanton horse against which the good horse and the charioteer must exert themselves. The urges are not in themselves a cause for shame, so long as the chariot as a whole behaves in accordance with the dignity due both itself and the beloved, pulling hard on the reins of the wanton as he charges forth with bloodshot eyes. The wanton horse will barely have recovered its breath as the pain from the bit and its fall diminishes, when it will angrily rail against its charioteer and yoke-mate, heaping abuse upon them as unmanly cowards for backing out of the arrangement they had agreed upon (Phaedrus 254c) just as your partner, taking his passions from the unruly horse, rails against you.

  “A tyrant is a person who lets the wanton horse have his way with him, and thus it is that the tyrant must have his way with all others.7 Your partner, BONDAGE, is just such a tyrant. So I do not think, BONDAGE, that you are altogether correct in saying that ‘everything else about him is great.’ All tyrants are dangerous, and none more than the tyrant who is beloved by his subject.”

  So now you’ve heard it from both of us, BONDAGE. Lose the tyrant, find the therapist.

  Margo, firmly

  Dear Margo,

  I’ve never been the type to fall head-over-heels in love, but all that changed a year ago. I met a girl and immediately found her irresistible. I couldn’t tell what it was about her, but she seemed to conjure up the deepest feelings in me, a kind of tenderness I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was only about six months into the affair that I realized that there’s something about her—the way she moves, the angle at which she holds her head—that reminds me of a lost love of mine from long ago, someone I’ve never really gotten over. All the mysterious tenderness I felt when I first laid eyes on her is channeled from a different time in my life, stirred up by a different person. Is there anything wrong with this? Am I being unfaithful by being with one person only because she reminds me so irresistibly of someone else?

  Yours truly,

  Tethered In Memory Eternal

  Dear TIME,

  I do not find the dynamic you describe so unusual. If whatever qualities the lost love possessed reappeared in a new woman, it would be perfectly logical for you to be attracted, again, to those qualities. This situation would only be worrisome—and unfair to the new woman—if it were just superficial likenesses that reeled you in, such as the angle at which she holds her head. If you are pretending you have recaptured and re-created the lost love, denying this girl her own individuality, that I would consider problematic. If she is your “type,” however, and also has gestures or movements that are reminiscent of someone you loved, that is all to the good (and is part of attraction). Just so long as you are smitten with this woman’s actual self, everything is fine. The trick for you is not to feel like Pygmalion and imagine you’ve gotten the former love back.

  But since you’ve expressed worries about the whole ethics of your situation, I decided to consult my expert moral philosopher, Plato. Like me, he agrees that there’s nothing unusual in the dynamic you describe. In fact, he went much further, and asserted that “all falling in love is due to reminding.8

  “That is why a person whom you barely know—though you long to know her as you long to know nothing else in all the world—can arouse such a profound response in a lover. There is an elusive sense of the familiar, escaping like a word on the tip of the tongue. There is a deep and terrible ache to recover something of infinite value that was lost. This sense and this ache are conveyers of a truth, telling us that this person is a reminding of a love you had known before.”

  I have to admit this was a new one to me, and I asked Plato a pretty obvious question. If falling in love is always a reminding of a former person we once loved, how did we fall in love with the first person to begin with? I should have guessed that Plato wouldn’t get caught in any logical traps I could lay, even though the way he sprang it certainly surprised me. Here’s what he said: “The reminding isn’t of a person at all; or if it is of a person, as in the case of TIME, then that formerly loved person was herself a reminding of something that wasn’t a person. A beloved person is a signifier who bears intimations of all that stirs us in existence. We are reminded of the nature of beauty and of all the other mysteries of existence that come to us but obscurely and by which we long to be overtaken and overwhelmed.”

  I had to push Plato: What if the trait that’s doing the reminding is only something haphazard and inconsequential about the person, like some particular body part—his upper lip, her inner thigh—or a sexy foreign accent? Doesn’t the beloved person have a right to be loved as the person she is rather than for the random tilt of her head?

  “There will always be the elements of the haphazard in eros. It is for this reason that eros is often portrayed as an irresponsible child let loose among us with bow and arrow. Our desires for another aren’t the conclusions of reasoned arguments, though often enough we wish they were, with premises entailing the beloved’s worthy attributes. Were it otherwise, we would all fall in love with the same estimable subjects. When we submit to eros we submit to the irrational and the random, allowing some perceived characteristic, whether insignificant or essential, apparent or real, to shatter us into bliss. All too often, the bliss proves ephemeral, cut short by further familiarity with the beloved. But if it does not, then who would be so foolish as to raise an objection?

  “As for the rights of the beloved, she has her rights to a reciprocal bliss, which might reciprocally retreat in the face of further familiarity with TIME.”

  Well, as they say: TIME will tell.

  Margo, temporizing

  Dear Margo,

  I’ve always been a girl who likes bad boys, and now I’ve found a bad, bad boy who breaks my heart on a regular basis. He cheats constantly—with other girls, married women, guys, for all I know with fresh fruit. He never lies about it, never apologizes. He expects to get away with everything, and he does. Did I mention he’s gorgeous, exciting, charming, exciting, rich, reckless, powerful, charismatic, a leader, exciting? In addition to the breaking-the-heart part, he’s talked me into some pretty risky adventures. So far nothing disastrous has happened but I’m afraid that given his tendency to push the boundaries and my tendency to turn to putty in his hands, I may end up doing something I’ll regret. I know you’re going to tell me to delete him quicker than spam from my in-box. But when he goes away the color drains out of everything and I feel like I’m sleepwalking through a beige-colored desert, and when he comes back—and he always does, eventually—all the colors come rushing back in. Should I resign myself to sleepwalking? Or should I just hang on for dear life on a joyride like no other, no matter where it takes me?

  Signed,

  I Don’t Know How (Or If) to Love Him

  Dear Don’t Know How (Or If),

  Women have gotten mixed up with VBBs (Very Bad Boys) against their better judgment and advice from others since boys started behaving badly. It is human nature to be attracted to the verboten, the bad, the dangerous. There’s an element of gambling, as well, and the idea—as unrealistic as beating the odds in V
egas—that you will be the one special enough to get him to change his wanderin’ ways. These entanglements are about living on the edge and satisfying one’s need for excitement. It is my unpleasant duty to tell you, from everything and everyone I know, that staying away from these “colorful” lovers finally comes from having one humiliating experience too many. These relationships are basically S&M—his S and your M. The lucky girls are the ones who finally gain the strength and maturity to say “No more. I am better than this, and I deserve someone who values me—not the game.”

  I was curious whether Plato had something philosophical to add to this. He told me that he had given the matter a great deal of thought, having witnessed the devastation wrought by a certain VBB upon one of his friends at close hand. “Strange to me was it that even the best person whom I have ever known, a person whose inner moral voice spoke so clearly that he passed through his life without ever committing a great wrong, even such a one as he fell victim to a VBB.” Plato pointed out that one of the deadliest aspects of VBBs—the part that earns them their V—is a sweetness mixed into the badness.

  “The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved’s recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love (Phaedrus 251). I do not think, but for that sweetness, the friend of whom I spoke would have become impassioned as he did and he would have recognized that such a one, entirely wanting in the desire to become better than what he knows himself to be, was not worthy of his love. She who signs herself “I Don’t Know How (Or If) to Love Him” repeated the word “exciting” three times. A VBB (and let us remember that there are also, though perhaps they are rarer, VBGs) creates around himself or herself a separate world in which all that happens is exciting, for exciting it must be. Excitement is the air they breathe, and they cannot exist without it. And when they pull others into their world, then these others leave the world of common air and now they breathe the rare air of excitement, which they are not accustomed to, and in their confused state they are more apt to think that the excitement they breathe is the excitement of love. She asks whether she should continue to love her VBB, but I do not think she really loves him, just as he, and this for a certainty, does not love her. For I think even the best man of his day of whom I just wrote did not love that boy as he thought he did. Perhaps if your questioner thinks more on the true nature of the excitement she feels, she will be able to see the wisdom of the course of action that you and I both urge on her, and then she will find the strength to break the spell that her VBB casts upon her. Last, let her think on this, that though love is a profound disturbance, not all profound disturbances are love.”

  To which I say: Amen.

  Margo, profoundly

  Dear Margo,

  I’m a twenty-two-year-old male, and I have zero desire for sex. I really don’t want to have it, ever. However, I am attracted to the opposite sex and not against the idea of having a romantic relationship, with the extent of “sexual” contact being hugs and short kisses. I’d be a perfect candidate for the priesthood, if only I were Catholic, or even religious. What bothers me about my condition is that I’m afraid I’m going to be lonely my whole life, since whoever I’m involved with is almost certainly going to want sexual intimacy sooner or later. So far, that’s been my experience. Do you think it’s possible to have intimacy without sexual intimacy? I guess the kind of relationships I want would be called Platonic. Do you think I’d be more likely to find a soul mate in philosophy departments?

  Yours truly,

  Thanks But No Thanks

  Dear TBNT,

  I do believe what you desire is possible, because—and I hope you are sitting down—you are not the only person with the feelings you describe. Asexuality is more common than many people think. Should you be interested, a good psychotherapist might be able to help you learn the genesis of your aversion to the physical aspects of intimacy. This understanding, in turn, if it did not change your mind, would at least make you more comfortable with something that is obviously troublesome, but part of your emotional makeup. To answer your direct question, I do believe there can be intimacy without sex. I have some friendships that would fall into this category. (A meeting of the minds, as it were, without any joining of other things.) People do not talk about “Platonic relationships” for nothing. As for scouting around philosophy departments, I think not. The philosophers of my acquaintance, and one in France I have read about, are sexually exuberant people, which is not to say that there is not a chaste philosopher out there somewhere. If you’re up for being a pioneer, the recent success of all the LGBT groups suggests that you might try to organize a group for asexual people, perhaps with a snappy name—something like CHASTE: Choosing Asexuality Together Electively.

  Of course, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to go to the source himself and ask the eponymous Plato what he makes of your question, wondering most of all what he thinks of the term “Platonic relationship” that we all find so useful in getting out of awkward situations. He confessed to being confused about what we call Platonic love, especially since he’s been busy on the Internet (and you might want to follow his lead) and acquired familiarity with such terms as asexual, aromantic, heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, and quite a few others he was eager to explain to me. Ironically, the only category he confessed confusion about was the one derived from his own name. “There seems to be a lot of ambiguity surrounding ‘Platonic love.’ Must it be asexual? Is it romantic or aromantic? And if it is, by definition, aromantic, what distinguishes it from any sound friendship? Platonic love seems to me a confused category.”

  Is Plato’s confessing confusion over Platonic love something like Charles Darwin scratching his head over Darwinism? No, he told me, it’s just our own confused use of the term that has him muddled. He knows what he had in mind: “The kind of love whose praises I have sung focuses more on knowledge than on carnal pleasures, although it does not necessarily preclude those carnal pleasures.9 But whatever the other pleasures, the particular quality of its rare intimacy and pleasure is one of knowledge, of which there are two kinds, which can exist in separation from one another or in unity.”

  Do tell, I urged him.

  “There is first of all the intimacy of coming to know the very person that you love, eager to possess every detail of her being, jealous for the hours of the days he lived before you knew him, the felt quality of her experiences that you can never recover for yourself and so mourn, exercising all your faculties to find ways to make up the lack in knowledge. And for this reason it can truly be said that all who truly love are savants on the subjects of their darlings, no detail too small or insignificant, as much in love with knowledge as any philosopher just so long as the knowledge is of the one whom they love. And that is one of the ways in which the intimacy of eros is the intimacy of knowledge.

  “But there is another way, too, even more rare, which consists in gaining a knowledge which is not focused on the beloved but is an intimacy nevertheless. It is the rapture of together gaining knowledge. It is the intimacy of making progress together in an understanding which is soul-shaking and therefore soul-making, enclosed with one another in an épiphanie à deux, ideas from the one flowing into the other, the hardened dryness of their twoness moistened into one as they are thinking with one mind and seeing with one vision. This is an intimacy which our clumsy bodies can only try to imitate as if in a comedy of crude pantomime.”

  Well, I have to admit that that’s not exactly what I had in mind when I used to say, “Let’s just keep it Platonic, shall we,” but there we have it, straight from the philosopher’s mouth. And I think, No Thanks, Plato has answered your question as to whether there can be intimacy between two persons even in the absence of anything more, ahem, seminal than ideas being exchanged between them.


  Margo, platonically

  * * *

  1Cf. Phaedrus 244a–245a, 265a–265b.

  2Cf. Phaedrus 252c–253c.

  3Cf. ibid., 245c: “We must prove the opposite, that this sort of madness is given by the gods for the greatest possible good fortune.”

  4Phaedrus 244b–c.

  5“I used to pick up what I thought were some of [the poets’] most perfect works and question them closely about the meaning of what they had written, in the hope of incidentally enlarging my own knowledge. Well, gentlemen, I hesitate to tell you the truth but it must be told. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors.” Apology 22b, translated by Hugh Tredennick in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). Also Phaedrus 244a–245c, and 265b, as well as Ion, especially 533d–534e.

  6Whereas we mean by “hubris” an excessive vanity or deluded arrogance, the ancient Greeks used the word to cover all cases of the unrestrained assertion of individual will without any regard for the wishes of others, or of the law, or of the gods. Depending on the context, then, hubris can be translated as wantonness, outrageousness, lawlessness, and violence against an individual, including rape. The most severe punishments in Athenian law were delivered against infractions deemed hubristic.

  7See Republic 573d, where Plato draws a link between the tyrant and Erōs. The Republic, unlike the Symposium and the Phaedrus, shows Plato in a far less accommodating mood toward Erōs, and he is willing to condemn the whole business as the “indwelling tyrant Erōs.” Plato’s uncharacteristic tenderness toward Erōs, most especially in the Phaedrus, led Martha Nussbaum to speculate that he was himself in love when he wrote that dialogue. And if he was, then it’s obvious, she informs us, with whom: Dion, the uncle of the tyrant of Syracuse. See her “ ‘This Story Isn’t True’: Madness, Reason, and Recantation in the Phaedrus,” in The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 200–233, especially pp. 228–231.