Free download.
Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device.
You can download and read online The Passage To Beauty: Beauty The Lover Of The Truth . file PDF Book only if you are registered here.
And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Passage To Beauty: Beauty The Lover Of The Truth . book.
Happy reading The Passage To Beauty: Beauty The Lover Of The Truth . Bookeveryone.
Download file Free Book PDF The Passage To Beauty: Beauty The Lover Of The Truth . at Complete PDF Library.
This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats.
Here is The CompletePDF Book Library.
It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Passage To Beauty: Beauty The Lover Of The Truth . Pocket Guide.
The final lines of the poem declare that "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", and literary critics have debated.
Table of contents
Pace Solomon, I argue that an account of love that only sees the goodness of love as something dependent on, and thereby relative to, the psychological processes of seeking union in love, is problematic. The aim, however, is not to provide a defense of Socrates, or Diotima, but to explore aspects of this speech that make the relation of love to the good central to our understanding of the concept. For this reason, the purpose of reading Plato is not to give a consistent reading of his views on love. It also provides a view into the question whether there are reasons for love see e. Robert C. Solomon, one of the fore-figures of cognitive accounts in the philosophy of emotion, turns to the question of reasons for love in several places.
One of his main claims is that the best reasons for love are Aristophanic ones; they are reasons that are constituted by the shared identity that to him is essential to love Solomon , , The notion that the relationship built by the lovers, and the life they come to share, provide the reasons we have for love, is a welcome contrast to the individualistic tendency to search for reasons for love in lovable qualities in the beloved cf.
In particular, the recognition that many of the needs, interests, memories and desires that shape our understanding of the life and love we share, can only be identified in relation to each other, discredits the idea that one could assess whether there are reasons for love independent of our personal relationship. There are important respects, not least ethical ones, in which I have to take the last stand on and accept responsibility for what I want. What I come to regard as my own desires and needs, however, will in many situations depend on both what you think in a matter, and the implications wanting something has for us as a couple.
The Symposium
Indeed, one significant aspect of sharing a life in love is that, whatever I take upon me to do, I ask you what you think in the end. Yet, there is something deeply troubling in the suggestion that any kind of process that binds people together in an erotic relationship, and shapes how they think of their identity, their individual as well as mutual desires, must be understood as an instance of love. There are cases of acting under such a description that can certainly be considered good for the lovers, as in the happy end for Romeo and Juliet that Solomon envisages.
- Seducing a Scottish Bride.
- Navigation?
- Die Mainacht - No. 2 from Four Songs, Op. 43;
- Girls And Hunters.
Here the lovers take an angry farewell of their families and settle down in a modest suburb in Wisconsin. They do their best to raise a family and to support each other in their careers Solomon , — Yet, what are we to make of more sinister cases in which the couple are bound together by evil deeds, 1 or mere regular deceptions and self-deceptions, or where their bond in other ways detracts them from doing what is good? Are we to think that these are examples of less ideal cases of the mutual creation of selves, or that they are cases where the love has gone bad?
Or are we to think that there is reason for us not to consider these relationships as real cases of love?
Notes for Students
For men are prepared to have their own feet and hands cut off if they feel these belongings to be harmful. In this sense, love is accorded a very special place among the emotions. It is presented both as a mediator between us as finite and imperfect beings and something eternal and perfect, in the first place the gods, but more importantly here, the ideal forms of the Good and the Beautiful, as well as a creative power bringing ideas of the good, beautiful and virtuous into being. For Solomon, the main concern is how to conceive of a good, or the best, reason for love.
On this view, a person may have bad reasons for loving another, e. Solomon , , but the case is still one of love. In the Diotimian, Socratic account, however, the question is not what constitutes a good object of love, be it in some specific properties of the beloved, or of the relationship we build together. Rather, the Good itself is described as the primary object of love. Love is a response to, a desire for or a pursuit of the Good, to the extent that a desire for union with another, which is not at the same time a desire for the Good, is a reason for not calling that desire love, but by some other name.
This is not to say that people may not mistake what they love for something much more specific than what is truly good, and, which stands as the central example in the speech, beautiful. In this way, the ladder that the lovers of wisdom need to climb in order to become educated in the rites of love, can be read as leading them to a more refined appreciation of what love is, and what they are to love. They finally encounter it in the search for wisdom attained in gaining knowledge of what Beauty is itself, since it is only through contact with Beauty itself that the lovers reach a hold of what is true, and truly virtuous.
Plato b , aa. The Socratic, Diotimian account, thus, ends in a reflection on the love of wisdom. For that reason, it is not only to be read as an account of personal love, but also as offering insights into the practice of philosophy, which itself is perceived as a form of love. It offers a view into the kind of contemplation on what is good, true and beautiful, as well as their interconnections, that Plato conceives as central both to moral reflection and to reflection on the whole. Yet, this does not mean that we should stop caring about love in our personal relationships for the sake of engaging in philosophy.
Rather there is need to consider how these philosophical insights about the relation between love and the Good contribute to our understanding of love in the context of our personal relationships. Here, we can reformulate the question as whether the good we perceive in love not yet specified in what respect is independent or dependent of us or of our love, if not of the gods.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
It is also confusing to think that the relation between our love and what we can conceive as good in our erotic relationships, must be conceived as a temporal relation. Here, I will therefore pursue the notion that the Diotimian speech offers us a way of thinking of the concepts of love and the good as internally related. Their reasons for doing something, longing for something or desiring something, are to be judged as good in so far as they grow out of the shared identity.
In other words, a reason is judged to be good if it is in accordance with their mutual desires, ends and preferences. For a large class of cases, this is also an appropriate picture for thinking about what is good for us in a loving relationship. It is also an expression of love that I, in such cases, respect your spontaneous desires as an expression of you, as you respect mine as an expression of me. In these cases, doing what is good for each other, or what is good for us, goes hand in hand with doing what the other wants or what we want to do together. There is also an array of cases in which we determine that something is good on the basis of it being an expression of us , of what we together think and feel on a matter, as well as what we, as a couple, consider important for a well-lived life.
In such cases, we may have to disregard what we immediately feel like doing to be able to pursue our common ends. Reaching them may require both self-control and perseverance. There is no need to deny that the goods we as lovers can ascertain in these respects, are immensely important for the life we share, giving it its form and content. Our mutual love can thus make us both feel good and feel good about ourselves. Without these ways of feeling good about the goods the relationship brings, we would certainly not have the concept of love and goodness we now have.
These judgements as to what is good for us as lovers, however, are all relative to our desires, preferences and ends. How then are we to make sense of the idea of an absolute conception of the good cf.
Gaita ; Holland , and its relation to love? This is a tricky question, since the absolute conception of the good best comes into view by using negative distinctions cf. Holland , On the whole, it is not a good among other good things i. This good concerns us when we raise questions as to whether what we want, for ourselves and for others, is good.
Poetry About Beauty
In other words, it is the question I ask, when I ask myself whether I am acting out of love, that is a real concern for you, and your good, or whether I am just telling myself that it is love. A central feature of the distinctions we call up here, is that we are not considering ourselves the judges of what is good. It is better to say that we, as well as our desires and choices, are judged in the light of a certain conception of the good cf. Taylor , When we speak of it in an absolute sense, however, reflection on what is good rather enters as an ethical question.
The absolute conception of what is good, makes claims on me, in that it confronts me with the question whether I truthfully can deem that what I am doing, or feeling, is good. They also provide some suggestions to how they can be educated in and through love. What, however, is the source of this conception, if it does not merely originate in our erotic desire? Now, in choosing to speak of an absolute sense in which we may speak about the good, I have tried to steer clear of that question.
One should, however, notice that the Symposium itself is a source of this conception. What is more, the portrayal of Socrates itself provides us with a personification of the love of wisdom envisioned in the speech. The spirit in which he engages in the philosophical pursuit of what is truly good and beautiful, shows us one way of taking the demands this conception makes on us seriously. The dialogue can in this sense be read as both celebration and contemplation cf. In that, his description of Socrates also gives expression to a love informed by the good understood in an absolute sense.
Nevertheless, this does not entail that anyone who encountered Socrates, and came in touch with this form of love of the Good, would also react to him, and what they perceived in him, with love, accepting this as one of the claims this conception of good makes on them. In these settings, this is revealed to be the love of wisdom personified in the philosopher. Alcibiades declares his intention to tell the truth about Socrates Plato b , e , and proceeds to tell the audience a story about how the philosopher awakens awe in him, but how this awe turns bitter when the older man resists the advances of the younger one.
The truth about love, which Martha Nussbaum finds in this speech, is the personal knowledge that the lovers gain of each other as particular individuals Nussbaum , — This knowledge is by necessity sensuous. It relies on images and imagination, and speaks to the role literature may have in furthering our knowledge of other people. Such attention to the individual, occasioned by the erotic awakening to the other, cannot, for Nussbaum, be fully represented by intellectual means. In particular, it cannot be attained by only communicating with the Forms. For Nussbaum, the speech of Alcibiades, then, functions as a means of putting forth her own objections against the intellectualism she sees as inherent in the Socratic, Diotimian account.
It also serves as a defence of the more personal features of love. It speaks of the shame Alcibiades experiences in encountering the peculiar kind of beauty and goodness that Socrates represents.
Navigation
It tells us that Socrates reveals to him a goodness that was unknown to him previously, but that this goodness is something that he is unwilling to accept. Although he, to some extent, recognizes the truth Socrates is telling him about himself, such as that his aspirations in the light of the philosopher and the life he leads, are expressive of pride, vanity and a hunger for power, he does not desire to change himself according to this truth. He prefers his freedom, and therefore, he also perceives the good that Socrates embodies, as something limiting, a bond from which he wants to break loose.
Until his meeting with Socrates, Alcibiades had succeeded in living his life under the pretext that these were noble intentions. The confrontation with the philosopher, however, brings out a different meaning. Socrates confronts Alcibiades with the question about who he is and wants to be. This is by no means a less personal question than his previous considerations of what kind of person he was in the eyes of others. In fact, it is more so, but the ethical sense in which he is personally involved in it differs enormously from the first case.
It demands of him to take himself seriously, carefully attending to the question of what he truly wants, and in what sense that is good. In that, his love for Socrates can also be described as a form of hate. These contrast with many of our moral ideals and handicap us in our aspirations to live in their light.