Love: A Progression in Thought

Spinoza argues that all of what we term feelings are really modes of thinking or thoughts. In our Great Books Redux, the class has worked through Plato's Symposium which is a work that attempts to deepen an understanding of the meaning of love. We had a guest lecturer Mariska Leunissen who immediately answered my first question. Socrates opens (177d8-9) with “The only thing I say I know is the art of love.” I thought this was strange because the first thing I learned about Socrates in Third Form (ninth grade) was "I know only one thing - that I know nothing." She showed that it was a clever linguistic reference as the Socratic knowledge of art of love (ta erôtika) as art of asking questions (erôtan). However her argument that it was a subversion of erotic norms through philosophy differs from my read that the Symposium is to help its readers move their notions of love from transactional to tranformational.

Someone once told me as a chocoholic (one more 12 step program to consider!), "you don't love chocolate, you use chocolate. If you loved it, you would open the refrigerator every day and say 'Good morning chocolate!'" This difference highlights the endpoints for a framework within the Symposium for moving from "love" as use of another to "love" as appreciation of another. Plato's transcendent and "gay" framework could be applied to the immanent and multipicities structure of today's sexual and love world with desire, of course, driving the progression to increasingly enlightenedly self-interested forms of love.The art of asking questions, of open-mindedness and of engagement is the basis for the growth of love and all growth involves an incorporation of ideas with their ultimate dismembering and then reconstructing and remembering into a more profound understanding. 

To me the progression looks to be:
Level 1: Phaedrus and Pausanias: This is the mutual "use" level which is transactional
Level 2: Eryximachus: This is the objective "use" level which is scientifically transactional
Level 3: Aristophanes: This is the "needy" or "soulmate" use level of increased feeling intensity
Level 4: Agathon and Diotima level: This is the level of poetry or truth gaining "self knowledge" breaking through to conceptual intensity
Level 5: Alcibiades and Socrates level: This is the level of true appreciation of "the other" - as I see it, Alcibiades attempts a "use" but doesn't end with one and Socrates has no "use."

The class was focused on Level 4 (my term) of Diotima being the highest progression for love. However, I think that Plato took the conceptual framework and tried to move it into action. As the common refrain states it, "love is not a noun, but a verb." Spinoza's framework on love is enriched here. Spinoza views love as a change (in a sense verbal) accompanied by an object (in a sense noun). The change dynamic here is differentiated by Plato along the axis of transaction to transformation.