Plato’s Phaedrus pictures a philosophy of love and the soul which, besides its characteristic queerness, contains many fascinating links to contemporary philosophy. One point in particular that I am struggling to understand, however, is the assertion that the beloved sees himself in his lover. What Plato means by that, I am not sure. I quote the preceding passage in full:
And as this intimacy continues and the lover comes near and touches the beloved in the gymnasia and in their general intercourse, then the fountain of that stream which Zeus, when he was in love with Ganymede, called ‘desire’ flows copiously upon the lover; and some of it flows into him, and some, when he is filled, overflows outside; and just as the wind or an echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns whence it came, so the stream of beauty passes back into the beautiful one through the eyes, the natural inlet to the soul, where it reanimates the passages of the feathers, waters them and makes the feather begin to grow, filling the soul of the loved one with love. So he is in love, but he knows not with whom; he does not understand his own condition and cannot explain it; like on who has caught a disease of the eyes from another, he can give no reason for it; he sees himself in his lover as in a mirror, but is not conscious of the fact [emphasis mine]. (255c-d)
At first thought, I am drawn to reflect on Levinas’s critique of modern ethics. Levinas says the modern ethic treats the other only insofar as the other is the same as one’s self. Thus, moral action towards others is still ultimately selfish. Is Plato saying that the love of another is merely the love of one’s self that somehow appears in the other? I don’t think so because the love of the lover is a genuine attraction to the beloved—the lover loves because he sees something beautiful in the other. The desire and love of the lover overwhelms the beloved and causes him to love in return, although he apparently may not see anything beautiful in the lover.
This strain of thought connects to Freud and Lacan, on whom I am only beginning a semester of study. Plato says the desire of the lover fills the beloved and, essentially, is adopted by the beloved. The desire of the lover becomes the desire of the beloved. In his little book, How to Read Lacan, Zizek points out this same theme in the movie 21 Grams, where a dying man declares his love to a widow that barely knows him. She confesses the next time they meet that now she can’t stop thinking about him, and although she tells him that he is ridiculous to profess such love, she ends up falling for him (44-45). What caused her to fall for him? Zizek turns to Lacan’s philosophy, pointing out that the man’s profession of love is a performative act (i.e. one that accomplishes the state of affairs in their pronouncement); that is, the man’s profession of love is a symbolic trust and engagement through which one not only obliges himself to the other but also obliges the other to treat one’s self in a particular way. Zizek explains:
When I tell someone ‘You are my master!’ I oblige myself to treat him in a certain way and, in the same move, I oblige him to treat me in a certain way. Lacan’s point is that we need this recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only in so far as the other whom we confront is not only my mirror-double, someone like me, but also the elusive absolute Other who ultimately remains an unfathomable mystery. (45)
The Other, as it is used here, is not simply the individual person with whom one interacts but the “big Other,” the Other of the symbolic order or unwritten rules of society. I do not wish to attempt to fully explain the Other now because I do not feel that I have an adequate understanding of it, but Zizek provides some basic hints at what Lacan means by the Other. The symbolic order of the Other comes out of a gift or offering that establishing a link between the giver and the receiver. The content of the gift is not important but what the gift symbolizes:
Everyone who is in love knows this: a present to the beloved, if it is to symbolize my love, should be useless, superfluous in its very abundance—only as such, with its use-value suspended, can it symbolize my love. Human communication is characterized by an irreducible reflexivity: every act of communication simultaneously symbolizes the fact of communication. (12)
To give another example, if two friends are competing for a job position and one wins, the proper thing for the winner to do (in order to preserve the friendship) is to offer to withdraw, and the proper thing for the other to do is to reject the offer (Zizek 13). Neither is necessarily conscious of this social norm, but each wishes to do the proper thing. There is therefore a “free” compulsion to do what is right. The situation is the same between the lovers that Socrates describes in the dialogue: the beloved feels that it is right to respond to the lover in such a way, unconscious of the symbolic rectitude of that fact. If the beloved rejects the lover, or if the losing competitor accepts the friend’s offer to withdraw, the social link or substance is destroyed (Zizek 13).
Although this explanation of Plato is perhaps anachronistic or imprecise, it is the best suggestion or explanation that I can find for understanding the reflection of the beloved’s self in the lover. I am not wholly convinced by the connection I have tried to make here, but the possibility of the link is nevertheless fascinating to me.
