Plato's View of Love

Plato is often criticized for preaching the gospel of me first. The claim is that his understanding of love is essentially egoistic, and this is seen as troublesome for the obvious ethical reasons. But there may be an even more troubling issue with Plato's understanding of love. In this paper I will attempt to argue that for Plato, love is in a sense impossible; that it can only ever be a desire for something out of one's grasp. The stakes are high but perhaps there is a way to understand this problem in a way that seems a little less damning. To do this I will analyze arguments from the Lysis and the Symposium, first questioning even the possibility of love and then attempt to show that love is in fact possible, all though in weaker versions than commonly supposed.

There are a number of conceptions of love in Plato's writings. One comes from the lysis where Plato, through the character of Socrates tries out the idea that love is the love of the useful. at 210c Plato writes, "Will anyone, then, count us his friends, will anyone love us in the matter in which we are no use?...According to this, then, you are not even loved by your own father, nor is anyone else by anyone else in the world, in so far as you or he are useless (Hamiliton 153)." Here one can see the idea people love people who are useful to them, but it seems that rather than loving people who are useful that what a person really loves is usefulness itself. Here is an example of Plato's egoism. Love for a person is not desire for the person him or herself, but rather desire for what the ways in which the person can be used to better one's own life. However, if love is simply a desire for useful people and things, can it really be said to be love? Here a lov...

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... when one considers that it is not a contradictory to desire the cessation of desire. Then the longing to posses the good could be understood in the sense of a person trying to escape the consequences of their natural imperfection. If love is only necessary because a person desires something they lack, which seems plausible given that it would be quite unclear why a person who wholly possessed the good would bother to interact with the rest of us mere mortals, then one may be said to love those that bring them closer to satisfaction, and likewise the consequence of their love is to bring forth the most possible freedom from another's unfilled desires. Though love can never find what it seeks, the illusion of love and fulfillment of desire, which doesn't differ from the other illusions which make up the world of human experience, make what humans call love possible.