Paul Otake
Socrates, through Diotima, says that every soul is pregnant and the ultimate end every person seeks is immortality. The pursuit of knowledge cannot go on forever because the knowledge we obtain is soon forgotten and replaced. So, unless there is an obtainable knowledge that is the end of knowing, something that is eternally good, the pursuit of wisdom is like the pursuit of love: futile. According to Diotima, the end to knowing, where knowledge becomes divine, is the state of Loving, in which the inherent beauty of all things is made clear. Eastern thought has called this condition Nirvana, and Judeo-Christian beliefs identify it as the universal love of God which extends through all things. These two lines of thought, though separated by thousands of miles and generations, are intrinsically part of Socrates’ philosophy.
The love that Socrates and Diotima speak of is the highest type of love: one devoid of personal interests that relishes in the success of its object. The greatest love encourages the best practices, characteristics, opportunities, and if at all possible, the best life. This love is necessarily selfless. The act of loving, in itself, should fill the lover with joy: the feeling need not be reciprocated because unreturned love should never lead to any sense of unhappiness. To say that this is not true would be to put a condition upon love (I will love “only if . . .” love is returned), and in this there is nothing of the eternal state of love. To propose a limit is false and, therefore, no longer love. Love should be given freely and without any consideration of the consequences.
According to Diotima, there is a definite progression to this free state of Loving. After a youth grasps the beauty in one thing, the next step is to see how that beauty transcends to all other things, or as she puts it, “the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other.”1 This lofty idea of love extends to divine concepts (particularly in Diotima’s speech 211A through 212B) to either the existence of God or its equivalent in Eastern thought.
Similar to Socrates’ “beautiful acts” Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, speaks of “active love” through the young monk Alyosha:
Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self- forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul.
(Book 1, 26)
Both Socrates and Dostoevsky share the idea that love is a process, extending through various steps to achieve an altered perception of the world and one’s own existence. Also, both contain the idea that this progression involves loving all people indiscriminately: the love of one necessarily leads to the love of all, and this must be done with a disregard for the self.
Besides its connection to Christian beliefs, “True Beauty,” which is the end result of the “State of Loving,” contains the principles of the Eastern philosophies Taoism and Buddhism. Lao Tzu wrote that the Tao exists without a beginning or an end; it does not exist singly in anything, but contains within it all things. And if all things, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, exist as a part of “True Beauty,” then in the state of Loving, all distinctions drop away, and opposites are perceived as a harmony within the whole. Just as Dostoevsky’s Alyosha strove to attain perfect self- forgetfulness, the “goal” of Buddhism is to remove from the mind the self to attain an awareness and harmony with the oneness of existence.
Harmony, or a unification of all contrasting elements, plays an essential role in the speeches of Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Diotima and is the central point of their philosophies. In Taoism and Buddhism, there are two universal entities, Yin and Yang, which always represent the meeting of opposites as a unified whole. Aristophanes’ harmony, in his myth of creation, comes from the union of men and women to form a perfect bond. He equated harmony with lovers who balance the souls of each other. Eryximachus uses the example of music and how the musician must attempt to harmonize one note with another to make his music beautiful. Music involves the idea of purity brought about by opposites because it is the combination of high and low sounds that makes a harmonious sound. Both, however, fall short of a divine concept that encompasses all things. Aristophanes’ idea, limited to the state of lovers, is an explanation of why one seeks another and leaves the rest of the world in question. Eryximachus’ ideas, as well, fall victim to narrow perceptions. His harmonious nature is only inspired by the Heavenly Muse, and he says that storms, droughts, and diseases are excluded from this harmony.
According to Diotima and the Tao, all things are by their nature beautiful and, therefore, good and in perfect accord with everything else. In Diotima’s speech, she defines no real good or evil and no pure or vulgar forms of anything. There is a beginning that leads to an end, and all things in between are a part of the ultimate good. Distinctions are made: there are people pregnant in body and people pregnant in soul; this can be equated with the idea of two separate branches of love, but does not exclude one or the other in the name of vulgarity. She does, however, mention that ignorance is neither beautiful nor good.
Loving, a universal concept, is the realization of the unbreakable bonds that connect one to the entire world; all becomes the ultimate end and the aim of one’s ambitions and sacrifices. Achieving this is possible by abandoning self-regard for the sake of love, and by offering oneself to become a lover in the truest sense of the word.
Works Cited
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Knopf, 1992. Plato. Symposium.