? Plato's exposition of love is mostly found in Drinking and Federer.
In Drinking, many famous people at that time got together and drank heartily, and expressed their views on love in turn. Here, the expression of comedian aristophanes is very interesting.
? Aristophanes believes that primitive people have three genders: men, women and bisexual people, and the three genders are unified in one person. Moreover, the primitive man's body is like a ball, with four legs, two faces, four ears and so on. These organs are twice as many as modern people.
? At that time, primitive people were very powerful, powerful enough to go to heaven and challenge the gods. This makes the immortals very unhappy. If mankind is extinct at once, who will sacrifice to God? So Zeus thought of a way to split the primitive man into two and become a man now, with only two legs, a face and two ears, so his physical strength was weakened. The body where the face is located is the cut surface, and the navel is the scar after the skin of the cut surface is flattened, which has a warning function and reminds people of God's punishment.
? People who are split miss their other half, so they look around the world. Once they find it, they hug each other tightly. In other words, people who love each other are a whole. Zeus saw that the people hugged together didn't eat or drink. He just hugged them until they starved to death and the number decreased, and the gods didn't provide them with anything. As long as the genitals are moved to the front, people can reproduce through sex.
Aristophanes's story is very creative, and it also conveys a point: sex is low-level and belongs to people who love each other. People who love each other just want to synthesize a whole, and the appearance of sex and its result (children) block the integrity of the people who love each other and are not appreciated.
? In Drinking, Plato expresses the relationship between love and sex through Socrates. That is, love is a kind of "spirit" between God and man, in the middle state of ignorance and knowledge. The goal pursued by eros is the idea of beauty. In other words, when a person is in love, he is actually pursuing something beautiful. People realize the possession of beautiful things by giving birth to them.
? This kind of birth is not only physical reproduction, but also spiritual promotion. In other words, Socrates and his disciple Plato both played an active role in love. This affirmation has a far-reaching impact and continues until now.
? In today's concept, sex and love are inseparable. The expressions of "love him, bear children for him" and "sacrifice for love" are modern versions of Socrates and Plato's views on fertility and love.
? Plato: Beauty is only the container of the idea of "sharing" beauty.
? When many philosophers in ancient Greece thought about the origin of the world, they had some sayings, such as water, fire, qi, number and so on. , when Plato came into idealism. Plato believes that the origin of the world is an idea (conceptual stage). Everything is everything because they have this concept (form).
? Generally speaking, a cup is a cup because the cup as a concrete object has the form of a conceptual cup. If we can't know the conceptual cup in advance, then in reality, we can't know the physical cup in the concrete object.
? Similarly, people are good and beautiful because they have the concepts of "goodness" and "beauty". He further pointed out that ideas can not be directly perceived by the senses, that is, we can not directly perceive the concept "cup" from the senses, but only from human reason and thinking.
? Plato said: On the one hand, we say that there are many things, which are beautiful, good and so on. On the other hand, we also say that beauty itself, goodness itself and so on, corresponding to each group of these multiple things, we assume a single concept, assume that it is a unity, and call it real reality.
? When we give a unified name to many individual things, we assume that there is an idea. Or in the words of later scholars, it is a concept of class. For example, all kinds of cups are defined as the general name of all concrete cups through human concepts: cups.
? How to know the world of ideas? Plato believes that sensibility is powerless. Plato does not deny the role of perceptual knowledge, but he believes that perceptual knowledge is incomplete and can only be understood through reason. Knowledge is not in the feeling of things, but in the thinking of what you feel; Obviously, in Plato's view, thinking and reason can reach the highest state of the existence and principle of things, but feeling can't.
? Love is the way we know beauty.
? Plato believes that people can't realize the "idea of beauty" through their own feelings, but with the help of eros, the god of love (that is, people's rational understanding of love), people can realize it. In other words, Plato's view of love is not love, not love, nor a low-level physical impulse, but a method and behavior of seeking the origin of the world.
? In the present words, we can't accept that the person I love only regards loving me as a means to achieve a certain goal, no matter how lofty the goal sounds. Because love is the realistic embodiment of our pursuit of beauty.
? Similarly, Plato believes that the beauty of a woman does not mean that she has a beautiful appearance and figure, but that she has a "beautiful idea" and is the material container of this "beautiful idea".
? At this point, Plato successfully and skillfully completed the sublimation and spiritual leap of love through the elaboration of love and his theory of ideas. Platonic love has also become a hot topic in later generations, and even a pure emotional model that eat drink man woman tried to emulate.