Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present by Wallace Robert M.;

Author:Wallace, Robert M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

7 Plato on Reason, Love, and Inspiration

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. . .

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

ché ’l bene, in quanto ben, come s’intende, così accende amore, e tanto maggio quanto più di bontate in sé comprende.

(For good, when understood as such, enkindles love, and more so the more goodness it contains.)

Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso xxvi, 28

In this chapter and the next one I aim to do something that may well seem impossible. I aim to reveal philosophy’s heart: to show how philosophy is inseparable from love.

The academic philosophy that many of us have been exposed to seems to have everything to do with the head, and little or nothing to do with the heart. Courses introducing philosophy’s main topics seldom touch on love. The “philosophy of love and sex,” which has nevertheless come into existence in the last few decades, is a small subspecialty among twenty or thirty subspecialties of Anglo-American philosophy. Of the “great” modern philosophers, only Hegel gives systematic attention to love.1 In the nearly two centuries since Hegel, academic philosophy has been preoccupied with the sciences, and secondarily with ethics and politics and perhaps with the arts or religion. Love, which appears to be peripheral to all of these, has not been a priority.2

This is no doubt part of what the German sociologist Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world,” which we have undergone in the age of science. We perceive love as, at most, a personal experience, not as a fundamental reality. So we let literature and psychology deal with it. Shakespeare’s comedies and Jane Austen’s novels speak to us across the centuries because they remind us how the experience of love can transform us and our world. But we think of such transformations as merely “subjective,” having nothing to do with reality, as such. Dante’s Divine Comedy constructed an entire worldview, a cosmos, around the author’s experience of love. But no contemporary writer, it seems, could do that. Probably, we suppose, only a Christian believer could do it.

Well, as a matter of fact, a Greek philosopher did it, before Christianity was dreamed of. Love plays such a central role in Plato’s thought that he is sometimes described, in a not too misleading formula, as simply a philosopher of love. And I’m convinced that Plato was onto something here, which our recent philosophy and culture have neglected to our great loss. Christianity, Dante, and the Romantic poets were right to feel that love is a reality that is at least as deep as the reality that the physical sciences reveal. Hegel was right to seek to vindicate this reality as an aspect of philosophy or systematic knowledge. And Plato’s much earlier treatment of this reality, in his Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium, penetrates as deeply into it as any other writing that we have.

Reason, love, and inspiration

Since Plato is also correctly known as an arch-advocate of “reason,” we might well wonder how the same writer can make central two things that seem to have as little to do with each other as reason and love.

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