Love, according to Socrates’s speech in the Phaedrus, is not necessarily as simple as many of us may view love in our everyday lives. By contrast, love, or Eros, is not easy to achieve and it can be seen as a goal in life. To achieve love is not an easy task. One must be a lover of philosophy. Eros also involves seeing beauty on earth and recollecting the true beauty that is seen in Heaven. Finally, for one to achieve Eros, one must love the gods and mold the beloved so that they reciprocate that love. The previous speeches in the Phaedrus condemn Eros, however, in Socrates’s second speech, the palinode, he praises Eros. The ultimate purpose of love, according to Socrates, is to achieve immortality by being a lover of philosophy and the arts, along with remaining close to the heavens where the divine are situated.
According to Socrates, the purpose of love is the immortality of the soul. He continues to explain how every soul is immortal and “That is because whatever is always in motion is immortal, while what moves, and is moved by, something else stops living when it stops moving” (245C). His argument for the soul’s immortality (245C- 246A), which is at the beginning of Socrates’s explanation that the fourth kind of madness, Eros, is the most beneficial to humans. The argument aims at the immortality of the soul, which is explained as being eternal motion of the soul, through which the soul moves itself. It is also a source and first principle of movement for all other things that move. A first principle is something that does not come into being. All things that come into being must come into being from a first principle, but a first principle itself cannot have come from something, hence being the first of something. Since it does not come into being, it also must be something that does not die. Because of this, that which moves itself is the first principle of movement, or the archê of movement. It is not possible for this archê to either to be destroyed or to come into being, or else things would not have a source from which things come to be moved.
As for the structure of the soul, to describe what it actually is would “require a very long account,” however, it is possible to describe what it is like. The soul is like “the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer” (246A). The white horses of the charioteer are possessed by the gods, and they are all of good nature. While the horses and charioteers of the gods are all of good breed, when the black and the white horses are together, they do not agree; if one horse is good, then the opposite will happen the other, making it difficult to drive the chariot. The charioteer, or reason, is tasked with making sure the horses can work with one another despite their differences.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates shares the metaphor of the chariot to explain the three-way nature of the human soul. In order for the soul to be able to fly through heaven, the soul’s wings must be in good condition. By contrast, a soul that sheds its wings will come down to earth and procure an earthly body, consequently forming together a “living thing, or animal, and has the designation ‘mortal’” (246c). This mortal is recognized as the union of body and soul. The soul’s wings are nourished by “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and everything of that sort…but foulness and ugliness make the wings shrink and disappear” (246e) and beauty, wisdom, and goodness are all in union with one another. The soul’s wings have the power to lift things up to heaven, where the gods live, and they are parallel to the divine.
The chariot, charioteer, and white and dark horses symbolize the soul, and its three main components. The charioteer represents reason, the dark horse represents human appetite, and the white horse represents thumos, or emotion. Each component has its own motivations and desires. For example, reason seeks truth and knowledge, the appetites seek food, drink, and sex, and thumos seeks glory and honor. Reason’s role is to guide the “horses” and to make sure that the two horses are getting along with one another to achieve the aims of reason, appetites, and thumos. The charioteer must have focus on the goals and he must understand that the nature of the two horses is going to be the opposite, but he must harness them so that they cooperate. The goal of the chariot is to reach the rim of heaven. Socrates says, “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” (247B-247C).
According to the law, the soul is not born into a “wild animal” in its first incarnation. However, a “soul that has seen the most will be planted in the seed of a man who will become a lover of wisdom or of beauty, or who will be cultivated in the arts and prone to erotic love” (248D). The soul will take different forms in their first incarnations, and these forms are in the arrangement of a hierarchy, of sorts, with philosophers, or lovers of wisdom at the peak. Following philosophers are (2) lawful kings or commanders, (3) statesmen or managers, (4) trainers or doctors, (5) prophets or priests, (6) poets and artists, (7) laborers or farmer, (8) a sophist or demagogue, and finally, (9) a tyrant. Being a philosopher is seen as a privilege and is clearly looked upon very highly. Leading one’s life with justice will improve one’s fate within this hierarchy. But, on the other hand, a life of injustice will lead to punishment. Each soul must live out a ten-thousand-year cycle, with the exception of those who practice philosophy, whose cycle is three thousand years. In addition, the soul lives through thousand-year cycles on earth, and at the end, the soul will be able to choose its new kind of life based on its experiences and recollections, whether this is a human life or that of a wild animal. The reason the philosopher’s soul is able to grow wings, that is, before ten thousand years are complete, is because it stays closest to the reality with which the gods are divine, heaven. The philosopher stands closer to the divine than other humans. As Socrates says, “He [the philosopher] stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine; ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god” (249D).
This brings up the fourth kind of madness: “that which someone shows when he sees the beauty we have down here and is reminded of true beauty” (249D). By this madness, he is called a lover. Beauty is a powerful privilege because it has the ability to be “the most clearly visible and most loved” (250E). According to Plato, an earthly beauty is called that only because it is a resemblance to heaven (Footnote 95). The vision of beauty on earth evokes a fear for the divine, and then there is a feeling of deep admiration. When a man looks upon a truly beautiful boy, he feels a chill and then begins to sweat. The stream of beauty flows into his eyes, warming him up and feeding his soul’s wings. The soul experiences an “aching and itching” sensation, and this feeling is compared to when a child feels is beginning to grow their first pair of teeth. This pain and discomfort eventually subsides and “is replaced by joy” (251C). However, when the boy is not present, the aching and itching return as a throbbing pain, but the memory of the boy allows the soul to retrieve its joy. The lover is always desiring to see the beauty of the beloved, it can be described as a painful yearning. That is how powerful the beloved’s beauty has on the lover, it takes over their body so that they cannot even sleep because they desire the beauty. For the lover, they easily forget the other important people in their life, like their mother, as nobody is more important than the beloved. The lover can simply forget about wealth and other worldly possessions because none are more important than the beloved. The metaphor that Socrates uses to describe how the immense pain is relieve is a doctor, when he says, “The boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain” (252B).
“This is the experience we humans call love…” (252B). This mixture of pain and joy is love. Love dominates the soul and makes it forget everything else, even the ones who used to be the most important people in one’s life, like a mother and friends.
According to Socrates, the way the soul acts on earth depends completely on the god with which it traveled to heaven with. A follower of Zeus, for example, will “be able to bear the burden of this feathered force with dignity” (252C). Here, Socrates is referring to love as the feathered force. But a follower of Ares, the god of war, might act “murderously”. The gods who people have relationships with include Zeus, Apollo, and Hera. The goal of the lover is to have the beloved emulate certain characteristics that those gods have and “show no envy, no mean-spirited lack of generosity, toward the boy, but make every possible effort to draw him into being totally like themselves and the god whom they are devoted” (253B). This means of molding the beloved to be like the gods relates back to the structure of the soul.
Socrates suggests that love is a process of recollection where the beauty of the beloved is a reflection of divine beauty. True love is only obtained when the soul sees the beloved’s face and “his memory is carried back to the real nature of Beauty, and he sees it again where it stands on the sacred pedestal next to Self-control (254B)”.
The lover is going to do anything that he can in order for the beloved to reciprocate this love. The lover wants the beloved to be inferior and wants to make him weak both mentally and physically. He wants to keep the beloved for himself and even isolate him from friends and academics. The goal for the lover is to have the beloved be completely reliant on him, as he will be deprived of his possessions like money and relatives.
The beloved may resist the lover in the beginning of their relationship with one another, but he eventually allows the lover to spend time with him, since good naturally associates with good. And as he spends time with the lover, the beloved realizes that the friendship with the lover is inspired by a god and it is better than all other friendships in his life. Eventually, the beloved also begins to feel the effect of desire flowing through him. He “has a mirror image of love in him” and acts on the desires “to see, touch, kiss, and lie down with [the lover]” (255E). However, according to Socrates, “He [the beloved] does not understand, and cannot explain, what has happened to him. It is as if he had caught an eye disease from someone else but could not identify the cause…” (255D). The beloved does not know why he has these feelings toward the lover, but when the lover is near, he is devoid from pain just as the lover’s is, and when they are apart, they both experience the same yearning for each other. Socrates explains that the desire of the beloved is nearly the same as the lover’s, but it is weaker.