Love, Abstractedly

An abstract argument against abstract arguments about love

SOCRATES: Well, now, what shall we say about love? Does it belong to the class where people differ or to that where they don’t?

— Plato, Phaedrus (~370 BC)

Reading the Socratic dialogues, one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing & clarify nothing?

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1931)

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This week I’ve had the uncomfortable experience of reading Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue which purports to be about love.

No doubt a part of my discomfort comes down to my own aesthetic preference, which is wild at heart. I much prefer Lee McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis to anything Plato himself produced. Plato aesthetically prefers, at least to my ear, to drone on in a monotone which runs out the mouths of his multiple characters. He vividly sets the scene of the Phaedrus, on a hot summer day, with the excursion of Socrates and Phaedrus for a walk along the Ilisos River. This is unusual because Socrates nearly never left Athens’ walls (he says as much). But soon the characters sit in the shade, forget the river, and ascend into pallid abstraction.

It’s worth pausing there for a moment to contrast Socrates’ sedentism with Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), §366, “Faced with a scholarly book”:

We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books — our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question about the value of a book, a person, or a piece of music is: ‘Can they walk?’ Even more, ‘Can they dance?’

Plato’s Atlantis, Alexander McQueen (2010). Vogue: “biomorphic and biophilic fashion,” which you’d think is more Aristotelian (Aristotle was much more interested in biology than Plato was)

Platonists assume that what people hate about Platonism is its theory of Forms, also known as the theory of “Ideas” (εἶδος or eidos, which originally related to vision, the “visible form” of something). In this theory, the world we experience is less real than the world of “Forms.” Wikipedia describes these Forms as “the non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, which objects and matter in the physical world merely imitate, resemble, or participate in.”

There’s much to hate about this theory. It banishes everything flesh and blood. It excludes walking, cooking and eating, singing and dancing, laughing and crying, living and dying. It says that this, i.e., life itself, is less “real,” in some sense, than the Forms are real.

But I don’t just hate the theory of Forms. Everyone hates that. If by Platonism one means subscribing to this theory of Forms, then even Plato himself may not have been a Platonist (and it may have been Pythagoras’ idea before Plato — an earlier enemy of life, ~570–495 BC).

What I hate instead about Platonism is its constant use of abstraction. Basically, I hate the way Socrates and his interlocutors use words. Let’s take the example of “love,” since that is the topic supposedly treated in the Phaedrus.

To me, the word “love” points to a series of experiences that I’ve had, and to related experiences others have related to me, and to poems and novels and plays and films and music, all of which are produced by humans, and all of which I have encountered in experience. (Experience, by the way, which is, by the theory of Forms, derivative and secondary.)

I don’t think that there exists some abstract category “Love” that can be rationally interrogated to learn anything about the individual cases.

First, this Platonist position requires an ontological presupposition that such a category exists, that it contains all the relevant cases, that it is internally consistent. To test this, Socrates might subject the concept to cross-examination or “elenchus.” If I were to try to give a general account of love, my own description would not begin with “survives logical cross-examination,” which is where Socrates typically begins in Plato’s earlier dialogues. (In the Phaedrus, he’s using the method of “collection and division,” about which more later.)

But more importantly, the assertion of a larger categorical “Love” does not illuminate anything about the individual experiences of love, which are always unique, and always changing. To treat an individual bout of love at such a level of abstraction does it violence, and is unjust to the experience.

My position does not make every love affair ineffable, nor does it obviate the need for the word “love” as a pointer to something important. Instead, I insist on making both the love affair itself, and any attempt to describe it, contextual, rather than relying on generalizations. The way I speak of love to you depends on me, on my beloved, and on you, my interlocutor — and not at all on the existence or the abstract meaning of the concept of Love. If I use the word “love,” it’s to summon to mind your own experience of love, so that your experience, shared in always-contextual language, can enhance my own understanding of my own experience.

That our discussion uses words no more means that we are discussing concepts than a love letter is just “something on paper.” The words spoken or written are the medium, not the message. And the words themselves are not necessarily conceptual. Concepts are a late, fragile, and contingent development on top of words; concepts do not do what words have historically been used to do — which is to connect people with other people.¹

A great love is an experience. Concepts, by contrast to experience, can only remind us of specific experiences we have had. In this sense, words are always metaphorical; they help us to carry experience across to the realm of language. The word “love” is merely a matter of convenience that allows me to discuss my experiences and learn from similar experiences that you have had.

Loving has, historically — I think it is fair to say — been much more of a verb than a noun. “To love,” “to be loved,” and “loving” simply must precede the idea of “love” in the abstract. In later posts I plan to argue that it is only an oddity of Indo-European languages that make it seem like the noun “Love” is primary, or can “cause” “effects.”

To the extent that we speak of abstract love, instead of speaking of a specific love, we do violence to the experiences which are the real source of our always-fuzzy and always-emergent notion of Love. The experiences of love lead to the word “love,” which then points back to these experiences. To assume that the concept of Love is the source of the experiences is to fall into a trap — though it is also the case that art and language experiences, like all those poems and novels and plays and films and music and discussions we have had using the word “love” do affect the way we experience love. It’s just not that there’s some entity “Love” behind it all which produces the experiences.

You go for a walk along the beach, and you pick out individual shells, each of which you find uniquely beautiful. You take them all home and arrange them carefully on your table. You get the light right and you take a single photo. It comes out beautifully. You send it to a friend.

“Beautiful!” says your friend.

“Yes,” you reply. “Beauty produced both these shells and this photo.”

Seems a bit backwards doesn’t it?

(Notice how English allows us to transform specific adjectives like “beautiful” into abstract nouns like “Beauty.”)

“But aren’t you yourself using abstraction in this argument?”

Yes, I absolutely am. Abstraction has benefits, but it also always has a cost. And I am pointing to the class of cases (“love”) where abstraction is just not worth the cost of losing any individual case. To be in love — or to experience the good, the true, or the beautiful, are too valuable in their individuality to reduce them to the ghostly abstractions of Love — or the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, all of which, I assert, are categories so vast as to be close to empty. When we use words abstractly like this, we have no idea what experiences we might summon up in another person’s experience; they may have next to nothing to do with what we mean. What appears “True” to Socrates is conceptual clarity; what appears “True” to me is the act of love, to give just one example.

What Plato loses by his act of abstraction are all the individual experiences of love. What I lose by my act of abstraction are just Plato’s empty speculations about a category.

Throughout Plato, there’s lots of grouping and division, categorizing and rearrangement of categories. And it’s not just Socrates. His interlocutors also like to list things off:

PHAEDRUS: That’s what I’ll do, then. But, Socrates, it really is true that I did not memorize the speech word for word; instead, I will give a careful summary of its general sense, listing all the ways he said the lover differs from the non-lover, in the proper order.

What could be more boring?

It is in this dialogue, the Phaedrus, that Socrates describes his method of “collection and division.” This is different from “elenchus,” or “cross-examination” discussed earlier. Here’s Socrates describing his method:

SOCRATES: Well, everything else in it really does appear to me to have been spoken in play. But part of it was given with Fortune’s guidance, and there were in it two kinds of things the nature of which it would be quite wonderful to grasp by means of a systematic art.

PHAEDRUS: Which things?

SOCRATES: The first consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give. Just so with our discussion of love: Whether its definition was or was not correct, at least it allowed the speech to proceed clearly and consistently with itself.

Trying to group all instances of “love” under “one kind,” then trying to systematically subdivide this larger category “Love” into genus and species does a different kind of violence than cross-examination, but it’s violent nonetheless.

Even the famous “charioteer” section, in which Plato vividly describes the relationship between the immortal soul, reason, honour and shame (represented by a noble white horse) and the bodily appetites and desires (represented by an unruly black horse), is a metaphor which Socrates uses to intensify a hierarchical and categorical split between the mind and body. He argues that reason is entirely separate from bodily desire, and presents the body and its desires as something to be controlled and subdued. In this passage, he argues that the charioteer’s difficulty comes from having a body, which impeded his ascent to abstract truth, which to Socrates is the highest goal. This makes life into something to be transcended rather than embraced:

The heaviness of the bad horse drags its charioteer toward the earth and weighs him down if he has failed to train it well, and this causes the most extreme toil and struggle that a soul will face. But when the souls we call immortals reach the top, they move outward and take their stand on the high ridge of heaven, where its circular motion carries them around as they stand while they gaze upon what is outside heaven.

Yeah, I’m actually fine just living my life, and loving individual people, and having individual wonderful experiences, thanks.²

But haven’t we heard of this desire for clean conceptual groupings before?

This is exactly what Durkheim revealed is neither innate nor basic, in Primitive Classification (1903), which we’ve covered in the past few posts. He showed that gathering scattered things into “one kind” and then subdividing this kind systematically is a socially constructed and culturally contingent way of seeing the world. The very act of classification, of genus and species (Latin translations of the same words genos and eidos in Greek) comes from human social organization.

Durkheim shows that it is not that humans are grouped the way we find nature to be grouped; instead we group nature by extending the way we socially group ourselves.

The meaning of the words themselves betrays this:

Genos means Family.
Eidos (and Latin species) means Seen.

Plato proposes a “theory of forms” (Eidos) which he claims is the best way of seeing the world. In an ironic twist of fate, Plato comes to the position that his Eidos, etymologically derived from the “visible forms,” are themselves invisible, and can never be seen or experienced.³

This is a very odd way to see the world, which amounts to “What really matters in life can never be seen or experienced.” This is a contingent and specifically Greek way of seeing. I won’t psychologize Plato here, except to say that I believe this move to be motivated by fear.

It is this particular Greek view that Nietzsche will criticise in his later work, most of which I’ve not yet read. I was flipping through Nietzsche today, after I had written all of the above, and I found this, in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888), “What I Owe the Ancients”:

And please do not bring up Plato as a counter-example. I am a total sceptic when it comes to Plato and I have never been able to join in the conventional scholarly admiration of the artist Plato. […] The fact that the Platonic dialogue, this horribly smug, childlike type of dialectic, could strike anyone as charming — this could only happen to people who have never read any good French writers, — like Fontenelle, for instance. Plato is boring.

As always, I’d love to hear from you — especially if you are a Platonist!

Bryan

1. That language is mostly non-conceptual (in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense) was shown experimentally in the work of psychologists Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) and Alexander Luria (1902–1977), the anthropologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), as well as theoretically in the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). More recent evidence supporting this comes from the linguist Daniel Dor (The Instruction of the Imagination, 2015) and the psychologist Cecilia Heyes (Cognitive Gadgets, 2018).

2. Spiritual experiences, by the way, like the one Plato seems to be pointing to, are also included under my sense of what comprises “individual experiences.” They may seem to disconnect us from the body, but they can only “seem” like anything in relation to the fact of our being embodied. Here is Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), chapter 3, responding pretty much directly to Plato, speaking of those spiritual “spasms and rapture” which may, to some, appear to transcend the body:

From their misery they wanted to escape, and the stars were too far for them. Then they sighed: ‘Would that there were heavenly ways by which to slink off into another state of Being and happiness!’— then they invented their ruses and potions of blood!

From their bodies and this earth they imagined themselves transported, these ingrates. Yet to what did they owe the spasms and rapture of their transports? To their bodies and to this earth.

3. Here I’m tempted to bring in Freud on how “heimlich” (“homely;” there’s a similar English pattern with “canny”) can come to mean its opposite (“unheimlich” or “uncanny”). But I’ll just point to “The Uncanny” (1919) if you’re interested.