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A higher stage is reached in the Symposium, which deals at once
humorously and profoundly with the subject of Love, human and divine, and
its relations to Art and Philosophy, the whole consummated in a speech
related by Socrates as having been spoken to him by Diotima, a wise woman of
Mantineia. From this speech an extract as translated by Professor Jowett may
be quoted here. It marks the transition point from the merely playful and
critical[4] to the relatively serious and dogmatic stage in the mind of Plato:
“Marvel not,” she said, “if you
believe that love is of the immortal, as we have already several times
acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal
nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and
this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves
behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the
same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called
the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age,
and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is
undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones,
blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the
body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires,
pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are
always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, which is still more
surprising—for not only do the sciences in general come and go, so that in
respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually
experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word ‘recollection,’
but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten and is renewed
and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in
reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things
are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old
worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind—unlike
the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way,
Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but
the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have
of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of
immortality.”
Elpenor's note :
[4]
Schematic to the point of error. To confine
myself to a most obvious example, how could we call ‘merely playful
and critical’ what is said in
Phaedo about immortality?
A History of Greek Philosophy /
PLATO
