Nehamas Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Symposium 211d

‘ONLY IN THE CONTEMPLATION OFBEAUTY IS HUMAN LIFE WORTH LIVING’

PLATO, SYMPOSIUM 211d

Alexander Nehamas

Socrates’ speech in praise of eros in the Symposium (201d–212c) is perhaps one ofthe most influential passages Plato ever composed.1 It is also one of the mostdiscussed, and any attempt to add to the huge literature that surrounds it needssome justification. My reason for returning to it is not so much a desire to offeryet another interpretation of what Plato really meant to say about the relationshipbetween eros and its inherent attraction to to kalon, which I will translate as‘beauty’. What I would like to try to do is to see how much of what Plato sayshere can be read not just as an inspired (and inspiring) flight of the imaginationbut also as something we can actually believe—a solid, knowing and accuratedescription of the phenomenology of love and beauty.

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In the closing parts of his speech, Socrates (claiming to be repeating the words ofDiotima, a holy woman with prophetic abilities) describes a complex hierarchy ofdifferent levels of love and lovers (207c ff.). At the lowest stage, he locates menwho are attracted primarily to the beauty of the human body—these are, he says,lovers of women and their union with beauty results in the generation ofchildren. The second stage includes men who are drawn more to the beauty ofthe human soul than they are to the human body and turn to paederasty. Theselovers themselves are of two kinds. There are, first, those who are in pursuit offame and who, in love with a particular boy, are inspired to create poetry orlegislation which benefits both their lover and their city as a whole—theirs,Socrates says, is an intellectual rather than a biological progeny. But there are alsothose who are moved by a passion for wisdom and whose intercourse withbeauty results in a life devoted to philosophy, which constitutes and produces thegreatest benefits of which human beings are capable. Within that last class, thereis another complex hierarchy, beginning once again with love of the physicalbeauty of one boy and gradually rising through love of the beauty of the soul, oflaws and institutions and of the sciences until it turns into love of the Form, thenature or essence of beauty itself, which turns out to have been the real object oferos all along.

But if every lover is ultimately drawn to the Form of beauty, which is glimpsedobscurely through everything else in the world that is to some degree beautiful, it

European Journal of Philosophy 15:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–18 r 2007 The Author. Journal compilation r BlackwellPublishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

would seem that nothing that lies below the Form in Plato’s ladder of love (not tomention the objects of the lower kinds of eros) is ever actually loved—at least not,as we often like to say today, ‘for itself’ and not for the hint of the Form, the traceof real beauty, we can discern within it. That might explain why, as many of hisreaders have thought, Plato appears to write that when a lover realises that onekind of beauty is higher than another (as the beauty of the human body ingeneral, say, is higher than the beauty of a single one, 210b3–6) he gives up thelower for the higher kind without a second thought. As far as the lover isconcerned, nothing has changed: although that can’t be any comfort to the boy heleaves behind, his view is that the only thing he has ever loved is beauty—thebeauty he first found in the boy and now discerns in something else. But that is acold and cruel kind of love, especially when one abandons another human beingfor an abstract, unfeeling object. It was exactly that thought which promptedGregory Vlastos to criticise Plato for failing to see that love is first and foremostthe love of individuals, and the questions Vlastos raised have ever since beencentral to the interpretation of the Symposium.2

Vlastos attributes to Plato the view that ‘what we are to love in persons is the‘image’ of the Idea in them’ (Vlastos 1981: 31). We love them, that is, only to theextent that they are good and beautiful but since none of us is perfectly good orbeautiful, love cannot be directed at us, blemishes and all: ‘The individual, in theuniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will never be the object of ourlove’ (Vlastos 1981: 31). Human imperfection, though, would imply that if I loveyou for your virtues I cannot love you for yourself only if Plato also believed thatif I love you for your goodness, your beauty or, for that matter, for your yellowhair what I really love is not you but your goodness, your beauty or your yellowhair instead. Plato may well have thought so, but we cannot just assume that hedid: many people, and even some philosophers, believe that we love people forparticular reasons without feeling that we do not therefore love them forthemselves.3 The issue is complex and the question remains open: we may lovethe image of the Form in a person without, for that reason, loving the Form ofwhich it is the image and not the person who bears it.

Perhaps, though, that reason is inherent in Plato’s conception of thephilosopher’s ascent, which Vlastos describes as follows:

Persons evoke eros if they have beautiful bodies, minds, or dispositions.But so do quite impersonal objects—social or political programs, literarycompositions, scientific theories, philosophical systems and, best of all,the Idea of Beauty itself. As objects of Platonic love all these are not onlyas good as persons, but distinctly better. Plato signifies their superiorityby placing them in the higher reaches of that escalated figure that marksthe lover’s progress, relegating love of persons to its lower levels.(Vlastos 1981: 26)

That is true: Plato considers the love of individuals inferior to the love of abstractprograms or theories and their love, in turn, inferior to the love of beauty itself.

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r The Author 2007. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007

But that is not to say that those who stop at the lower reaches of the scala amorisdo not love the person or the institution that inspires them. Even if the love of‘impersonal objects’ cancels attachments to particular individuals, all that followsis that a life devoted to politics (nomoi kai epitedeumata) or learning (mathemata) isbetter, more valuable and, in the end, happier and more fulfilled than the privatelives of most of the people in the world. That would not have been news toPlato’s Greek audience (although his reasons for thinking so certainly were). Noris Plato the only philosopher, in Greece or anywhere else, to have thought thatpurely private lives of no distinction are of little value, and to rank the value ofdifferent human lives on a hierarchical scale, with private lives at its lowest end.Nietzsche was after something similar when he wrote, ‘To live alone one must bea beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both—aphilosopher’.4 Plato may consider love of the individual as the lowest level in thephilosopher’s ascent to the Form, but does not, just for that reason, deny thatindividuals can be truly loved. He only claims, rightly or wrongly, that life is atits best when it is devoted to something else instead.

The Form of Beauty, then, may be more beautiful than everything else and theintensity of the true philosopher’s love may dwarf our everyday feelings, butsince eros is essentially the desire for beauty, and eros is certainly felt by everyone,beauty is not the exclusive property of the Form. It is, as both everydayexperience and the Symposium itself tell us, a feature of the world around us. Thephilosophic lover does not reject the beauty of what he leaves behind as he risestoward the Form. Although he discovers beauties that exceed anything he hasalready seen, the beauty of what he leaves behind does not disappear; only itsbrilliance diminishes, as the moon’s radiance wanes in the light of the sun.

When, having first been attracted by the beauty of a particular boy, the loverfirst discerns the beauty that is common to all bodies, Diotima says, he must ‘lookdown’ on his passion for one and think little of it.5 Doesn’t he then cease to findthe boy that started him on his way beautiful? No—because it is, without a doubt,the intensity of his passion for the boy and not the boy (nor perhaps even thepassion) itself, from which he must turn away.6 That is, in fact, exactly what animportant passage in the Republic (474c–475e), whose relevance to this issue hasnot been sufficiently noticed, suggests. Socrates here is trying to explain what aphilosopher—a notion that is being introduced here for the first time—is andwhy philosophers are ideally suited to rule in the perfect city. He begins bydescribing Glaucon, with whom he is talking at this time, as ‘a lover of boys, anerotic man’ (philopais kai erotikos). Men like Glaucon, he continues, always have areason for finding every boy of the right age attractive: a snub nose is pert, ahooked nose regal, one that falls in-between is perfectly proportioned; dark boysare manly, pale ones are children of the gods and as for being ‘honey-yellow’, theword speaks for itself. Socrates may be speaking tongue-in-cheek here, but hispoint is serious: those who love the beauty of boys in general love the beauty ofevery individual beautiful boy; whether ‘true’ love is or is not exclusive in themanner that is canonical in our days is simply not an issue. And his point isserious because it allows him to introduce the idea that a lover of boys, like a

‘Only in the Contemplation of Beauty is Human Life Worth Living’ 3


lover of wine, of honour, of sights and sounds or a lover of wisdom (especiallywisdom)—a philopais, a philoinos, a philotimos, a philotheamon, a philekoos or, finallyand most important, a philosophos—is in love with everything, and neglectsnothing, that belongs, so to speak, to the ‘field’ to which his desire is directed: thephilosopher is a lover of all wisdom.

The lover of bodily beauty, then, does not abandon the boy who first sparkedhis desire—he loves all boys, as much as . . . Don Giovanni, who also has adifferent reason in each case, loves every woman! Nothing could be moresurprising than this extraordinary convergence between Mozart’s rogue andPlato’s philosopher, unless it is the fact that Socrates’ introduction of philosophyin the Republic and perhaps into Western thought as well is the actual source ofLeporello’s Catalogue of his master’s conquests in Don Giovanni! The connectionis established through Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, where Socrates’ joke hasalready been given a heterosexual spin, through Moliere, who translatedLucretius into Latin and inserted it in The Misanthrope, and Lorenzo da Ponte,Mozart’s librettist, who derived the text for Don Giovanni from Moliere.7

We should not allow this connection, however, to mislead us into thinking thatSocrates is advocating a betrayal of the boy with whom the philosophic loverbegins his ascent. Here I must disagree with A.W. Price, who thinks that at thisstage the lover ‘is at least unfaithful to [the boy] and may desert himaltogether’—although Price does not believe that the betrayal is sexual: ‘Whatis envisaged is not precisely sexual promiscuity: the lover was aim-inhibited (asFreud would say) from the beginning, for his attachment to one body onlyproduced words (210a7–8). Hence the only Don Juanism in question is one ofattraction, not of gratification’.8 Price finds such ‘promiscuity’ in Socrates’ ownsusceptibility to beauty as Alcibiades describes it in his own speech in theSymposium: ‘He’s crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them aroundin a perpetual daze’ (216d2–3). Yet even if we could describe Socrates as a lover ofall bodies, his passion has nothing of infidelity: he never abandons one youth foranother.9 The fact is that the second stage of the ascent makes contemporaryreaders uneasy, for we assume that people who love more than one ‘body’ mustdo so for selfish and exploitative reasons: so strongly are our intuitions shapedthrough the values of monogamy. There is then a strong temptation either tominimise the sexual contact involved or to convince ourselves that the lover is nolonger interested in any particular body but only in body in the abstract—not apromising sexual object.10 But instead of thinking of the lover seducing as manybeautiful boys as possible, we would do better to imagine him ‘giving birth tobeautiful logoi’ with as many beautiful boys as possible. Instead of suspectingthat seeing the beauty of the body leads him to betray his rightful lover (and, ofcourse all the others as well), we would do better to insist that as long as he iswrapped up in one boy only he is depriving others of his advice. Unlike itsmodern readers, the Symposium pays no serious attention to the question whetherthe lover has sex with some, with most or even with all of them. Nothing, in anycase, prevents a lover from continuing to have a favorite while seeking thecompany of other young men; Socrates is constantly in pursuit of the young

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(though in his case, as we have seen, sex is not what he is after) but Alcibiades—we know from the Symposium (213b–d), the Protagoras (309a–b) and the Gorgias(481d)—continues to have a special place in his life.

Nothing Plato has said so far implies that the philosophic lover discards theobjects he meets on his way as he continues his ascent. That is as it should be.Although, for example, I consider Dostoevsky a far greater writer than IanRankin, I do not for that reason dislike Rankin’s mysteries—nor did I, once I readDostoevsky, stop reading mystery novels altogether. Although at moments Platomay have believed that it was wrong of me not to have done so, nowhere in theSymposium does he even suggest that it is wrong to love the lesser mysteries—only that those who do are not as happy as those who are devoted, say, to Crimeand Punishment. As the Phaedo might have put it, the beauty the lover leavesbehind neither withdraws nor is annihilated when a greater one emerges beyondit (102d–e).

Plato never even suggests that the lover who realises that the beauty of soul is‘more valuable’ (210b7) than the body’s also realises that he was wrong to havevalued bodily beauty in the first place. Vlastos implies that he does: ‘At the nextlevel, higher in value and still more energizing, [Plato] puts the love of mind formind, expecting it to prove so much more intense than skin-love that merelyphysical beauty will now strike the lover as a ‘‘small’’, contemptible, thing’.11

‘Contemptible’, though, is in my opinion much too strong as a translation of‘smikron’, which is much closer to ‘negligible’ or ‘unimportant’.12 I know what itis to feel that to have loved some particular person was a mistake: that is not thefeeling Plato attributes to the philosophic lover. In any case, the passage 210c5–6,to which Vlastos refers here, applies not to ‘the love of mind’ (the soul) but onlyto a higher stage of the ascent—to lovers who have already discerned the beautyof laws and institutions. Only then does sex become at most of secondaryimportance to the philosophic lover (though it is not yet completely abandoned—that, as we shall see, occurs only at a still higher level of the ascent). The ‘love ofmind for mind’ is much more intimately tied to what Vlastos contemptuouslydismisses as ‘skin-love’.

More generally, the Symposium does not distinguish between the ‘physical’ andthe ‘spiritual’ or the ‘mental’ nearly as starkly as we are often tempted to think. Itis not even clear whether the desire to have children is absent from anyone, evenfrom the most perfect philosopher. We can see this from the way in whichSocrates tells us Diotima showed him that, however different their particularfocus, all lovers are united by their desire to possess the beautiful (that is how eroshas been defined; see, e.g., 204d3) or, more precisely, by their desire ‘to give birthin beauty’ (206b, 207e). Every human being, she said, is pregnant both in bodyand in soul and wanting to give birth is part of our nature. It is important thatPlato uses that expression, because it allows him to hold that neither pursuingfame (‘the lower mysteries’ of eros) nor pursuing wisdom (‘the higher mysteries’)excludes the desire to have children of the most ordinary sort. How could hehave thought that it does when Socrates, his model of the philosopher in theSymposium, was known to have had two sons with Xanthippe (and perhaps, if



Diogenes Laertius is to be trusted, another son with Myrto, the daughter ofAristides the Just)?13 Giving birth, Diotima continues, is only possible in thepresence of beauty and it is the only way in which mortal beings, which are incontinuous change both in body and soul, unlike immortal things, which remainforever unchangingly the same, can approach immortality: for in giving birththey leave behind something that, being like them, perpetuates them. Biologicalreproduction is the easiest and least admirable way of self-perpetuation andclearly the most common path to it.

Some people, though, are pregnant in their soul even more than in their body.14

Their desire for immortality manifests itself as a thirst for ‘immortal virtue andfame’ (208d). These people turn to paederasty15 and, in the company of abeautiful boy (beautiful, Plato implies, in both body and soul), produce beautifullogoi concerning virtue, especially the wisdom and temperance that are necessaryfor life in society. These are the children they are happiest to leave behind—‘morebeautiful and more divine’, than any biological offspring and clearly preferable tothem. The greatest instances of such logoi are the legacies of the great poets andlegislators, which serve to improve both cities and citizens and win immortalfame and glory for their creators (209d). And above them, as we shall see in moredetail in a moment, there are those who, striving directly for wisdom with noconcern for fame or reputation and in the presence of Beauty itself, give birth tothe most beautiful and most virtuous achievement of which human beings arecapable.

Plato is not thinking in a vacuum. The motives of the three kinds lovers heintroduces in the Symposium are the motives he distinguishes when he ‘divides’the human soul in the Republic (434d ff.). Lovers of the beauty of the body areprimarily motivated, like the class of artisans in the Republic, by their souls’appetitive desires. These are desires for, among other things, food, sex and shelterand they are common to, though not primary in, every human being—Plato doesnot believe that philosophers, say, leave them behind.16 Other desires, though, arenot as widely shared and they are definitely not as strong in all as they are insome. In the Republic, these are, on the one hand, the desires of the thumos, thesecond (sometimes called the ‘spirited’) part of the soul, which loves victory andhonor.17 These are just the motives that emerge in Socrates’ description of the‘lower mysteries’ in the Symposium, aiming at glory and fame. The third class ofdesires, on the other hand, belong to that part of the soul that aims at knowledgeof the truth and loves learning and wisdom.18 These, of course, are the desiresthat move the philosophic lover, who is enthralled by the beauty of knowledgeand virtue. Each part of the soul, the Republic tells us, has its own appropriatepleasure (581c) and each, we learn from the Symposium, has its own appropriateeros. But since the pleasures of the soul, despite the fact that they differimmensely in degree, are still for all that pleasures, so the beauty of the objects oferos, however humble in comparison to the beauty of the Form of Beauty itself, isstill the same sort of beauty and, however dimly, a reflection the Form’s light.19

The Form of beauty, then, may be the final, the highest, the purest and themost beautiful object of eros, but that does not imply that nothing else is beautiful.

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Every lover loves beauty and secures some sort of immortality through it. Thedifference is one of degree, the philosophers’ vision imparting beauty andgoodness to every one of their actions and, by permeating every single aspect oftheir life, imbuing it completely with happiness.

Plato establishes the connection between beauty, goodness and happiness bymeans of one of the most radical and difficult steps in his gradual but startlingtransformation of eros from an urge for reproduction to the practice ofphilosophy: his shift from considering eros as a desire to possess beautiful thingsto the desire to create them. The transformation comes when Socrates introducesthe idea that eros is primarily a desire to give birth and reproduce in beauty,which we have already discussed. It is that idea which allows Plato eventually toargue that the philosopher, who gives birth in beauty itself ‘does not give birth toimages, since he is not in touch with an image, but to true virtue, since he is intouch with the truth’. And it such offspring that make the philosopher truly dearto the gods and bring him as close to immortality as it is possible for a humanbeing to come (212a). Needless to say, difficult questions surround the connectionbetween beauty and goodness—the conviction that if you love someone you willnever do them (or yourself) harm, which is so crucial to Plato (204d–205b); but histransformation of eros from possession to production, from desiring somethingexternal to bringing forth something from within, is no less baffling andobscure.20

To begin with, the very idea of possessing the object of one’s love, with whichSocrates begins his account of eros (200a ff.) is suspect. It calls to mind a wish todominate, exploit and manipulate, a lack of respect and regard that reinforcescommonplaces about the ‘acquisitiveness’ and ‘egocentricity’ of Greek ethicalthought. The desire to possess, one might say more generally, belongs to theconsumer, not the lover; it reveals not love but its absence. How can we possiblywant to own, and thus be free to use, what we value (as we say) for itself, not as ameans but as an end? What would in that case distinguish us from the perversecharacter whose anatomy is given in John Fowles’ novel, The Collector?

Possession, though, is not identical with ownership—or, if it is, it is ownershipof a different kind: I may possess something as a detachable piece of property,losing which will have no effect on who I am, or as a genuine part of myself,which I can’t lose without undergoing a serious change of my own.21 To possesssomething as love requires—a person or a work of art I want to treat not merelyas a means but also as an end in itself—I must want possession to be a mutualaffair: I want it to be mine as much as I want to be its own as well. To treatsomething as a means is to take my desires as given and expect it to satisfy them:I don’t expect that what I want and value will change as a result of our interactionexcept accidentally—certainly not as a result of any desires or values it happensto have. But when I treat something as an end, I am willing to reconsider mydesires and values as a result of taking its own desires and values into account.I treat it with respect. And I also make myself vulnerable to it—vulnerable in thatI am allowing it to steer me in new directions I might not even have conceivedwithout it. That is an essentially prospective commitment—a guess at the future



and it expresses a desire not only to spend part of my life in the company of theobject of my love but also an urge to get to know it better and see how it is likelyto affect me (and how, in turn, I can affect it) best. And so the pursuit ofknowledge is always an element of love and an attendant of beauty. For the godEros, Plato says, was conceived the day Aphrodite was born, and was himselfborn to follow and serve her; that’s why he is ‘by nature’ a lover of beauty (203c).Eros is always of beauty, never of ugliness (201a); no one can ever give birth inanything ugly, only in things of beauty (206c). It is, in fact, impossible to lovesomething that strikes one as ugly (though others may find it so). I only know ofone instance where such a case is possibly being envisaged: Shakespeare’s DarkLady sonnets, which just for that reason have caused no end of trouble to theirreaders.22

To love someone—not as a Christian loves God’s children23—is inseparablefrom finding them beautiful. Love has already died when one day I am no longermoved by my lover’s beauty, when I can look at her face dispassionately andmeasure, so to speak, the quality of her features. Love can survive the most bitterhatred—Catullus knew that24—but cannot live a moment with ugliness: hate isnot its opposite; indifference is.25 I don’t have in mind what is often called ‘inner’beauty, assumed to be separate from the ‘external’ or the ‘physical’. Beauty isalways manifested in a lover’s appearance, and we are only making things easyfor ourselves when we say that some people love each other not for their looksbut for their kindness, their sensitivity or their intelligence instead. If, indeed, welove people on account of their features, the psychological, mental and moralqualities that may attract us to them are always apparent in their face andbearing, literally in how they look to us. The ‘inner’ cannot be separated from the‘outer’, as Isabel Allende’s memoir, Paula, so powerfully illustrates.26 It is thesame with Emma Bovary. When she finds herself interested once again in her sadand mediocre husband because he expects to perform an operation that willmake him famous and give them the life she has always dreamed of, she notices,‘with some surprise, that his teeth were not at all unsightly’. When, naturally,Charles botches the operation, Emma is bitterly disappointed and as a result‘everything about him exasperated her now, his face, his clothes, what he did notsay, his entire being, his very existence’.27

It was one of Plato’s most startling and original insights to see that love impelsforward while beauty beckons—in space, toward another object, in time, towardthe future.

But since it is impossible to know in advance what beauty promises to yield,when I act on what is no more than a promise of something valuable but stillunknown I am taking a serious risk, for I don’t now know how I will change as aresult and whether the change will be for the better or for the worse. And so partof what I undertake when I try to make something mine is to come to know it aswell as I can, in order to understand what it is and see how it will affect me andwhat it will be able to give me. To love something is always, in part, to try tounderstand what makes it beautiful, what drew me and, as long as I still love it,continues to draw me toward it.

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Consider, in the first instance, a work of art. To be overwhelmed by the beautyof In Search of Lost Time, as I am, is not simply to experience certain feelings inreading it. It is also to be willing, literally, to devote part of my life to it—not justto read it (although that will certainly be part of it) but also to come to know itbetter, to understand it, to see what Proust accomplishes in this work. For that,I need to learn (as I have tried to do) about Proust more generally, about thesocial, cultural and political situation in Paris between the end of the 19th centuryand the first years of the 20th, to improve my French, to understand more aboutthe Dreyfus affair, antisemitism and homosexuality, about the history of theFrench novel and the novel more generally, including its social origins, to lookat Vermeer, to listen to Debussy and much else besides. That, in turn, is notonly a matter of sitting alone in my study. It involves meeting people I wouldhave not met before, learning things I would not have otherwise learnt, travelingto new places—spending part of my life in ways I couldn’t have imaginedwithout having been led to them by Proust. All that belongs to my love for thenovel, which is inseparable from my effort to understand it and, in fact, to see itas no one else has ever seen it before—that is what ‘making it mine’ finally comesto. In other words, my love for the novel is necessarily expressed in an urge tointerpret it and to continue to do so as long as it attracts me, as long as I still feelthat there is more to it than I have seen so far. And as long as I am still trying tointerpret it, the more various the things to which I will relate it in order tounderstand it, to see how it accomplishes something that nothing else hadaccomplished before.

There is, in other words, no difference between delving more deeply into thenovel and wandering more widely into the rest of the world—the more I bring tomy understanding of the novel, the more the things in the world to which I relateit, the better I can see how it is different from and how it resembles them andrecognise its specific accomplishment, the features that distinguish it fromeverything else. The better, that is, I come to see how it is in itself, in its own right.To the extent that being involved with it has changed my life, that book has cometo possess me; to the extent that I have found something new and unusual in it, Ihave made it mine; and, to that extent, I have become new and unusual myself.

The same is true of love for persons. When I want to make someone I lovemine I also want her to want to make me her own as well. I am willing to allowher characteristics, many of which I don’t yet know, influence who I will be and Iwant her to let features of mine help shape her future. More important—and herethe risk seems greatest—I am willing for us to influence each other by means ofcharacteristics that do not yet exist but will come into being only as a result of ourinteraction. How can anyone know where such a process is likely to lead?

The kinds of things we love—persons and objects both—and our reasons forloving them and finding them beautiful determine and, express, a large part ofour character. To find something beautiful, I have been saying, involves the sensethat life will be more worthwhile if that beautiful object were to become part of it.But I have said nothing about what makes life worthwhile and unlike Plato, whothinks that this is in all cases moral virtue, I don’t even think that there is



anything both general and informative to say about it. The best I can do, which isalso to beg every question, is to say that in the ideal case the various paths wehave followed through life on account of the things we have loved and what wehave come to understand about them will gradually transform us too intosomething that no one has seen before and that is itself worthy of love, attentionand admiration in its own right—into something beautiful.

The possibility that the pursuit of beauty may lead to its creation is one of themost important truths that motivate Plato’s identification of eros with the desireto give birth in beauty—both with a reaction to something that already exists andwith the urge to bring something new into the world. And since he thinks thatbeauty and goodness are so closely connected, he is not nearly as troubled by therisks inherent in that pursuit as I am. For me, though, there is no guarantee thatthe things I find beautiful will lead me either to a good or a successful life. Andeven if they do, it will always be possible to say that instead of immersing myselfin Plato or Proust I should have worked for Oxfam instead. Yet here, too, theproblems persist: how do I know what that would have led to in the long run—what, for example, if I had ended up embezzling their funds?

In any event, wherever love and beauty are present there is also the effort tounderstand what we love or, what comes to the same thing, to understand whywe love it. As long as love persists, no answer will ever be complete; as long assomething still strikes me as beautiful, the sense that there is something about itthat is still worth coming to know and celebrate—that there is more to love—remains. That is why judgments of beauty are always at least partly prospectiveand why the most beautiful things always seem inexhaustible.

This forward-looking element in the perception of beauty, the sense thatbeautiful things are constantly drawing us further, is one of the great revelationsof the Symposium. I have described the movement—the beckoning of beauty, theimpetus of love—both as an absorbed immersion in the beautiful object itself and,simultaneously, as an expanding vision of the world to which it belongs. Platodescribes it as an ascent. Does that ascent leave the object with which it beginsbehind? Does beauty, in drawing us further, also draw us away from whatsparked its pursuit?

The path to the Form, Socrates says, begins with the beauty of a particular boyin whose company a man gives birth to beautiful logoi (210a4–9). These logoi—torepeat: pieces of advice, accounts, arguments, poems, laws, and their results—areto Plato’s scheme what new understandings and interpretations as well as theirconsequences are to mine, except that Plato is convinced that as a result of theirinteraction both lovers change for the better. If the lover has a bent forphilosophy, there comes a point when he realises ‘that the beauty of any one bodyis sibling to the beauty of any other and that . . . the beauty of all bodies is one andthe same’ (210a8–b3). How he comes to that realisation is not something Platoexplains—we can only guess. One guess, then, is the following. Pressed forwardby eros, which, like every desire, is directed at what is not already possessed(199e–201c), the philosophic lover tries to make the boy’s beauty more completelyhis. But what distinguishes the philosophic lover from the lovers of the lower

10 Alexander Nehamas


mysteries, who desire glory and fame, is that for him the desire to possess beautyis inseparable from the desire to understand it, to understand, that is, why heloves it, what makes it beautiful. And what he finds, for Platonic reasons we mayleave aside for now, is that what makes this boy’s body beautiful, and explainswhy he loves him, is what makes all beautiful bodies beautiful, what they allhave in common. He now becomes a lover of all beautiful bodies (210b)—hesurrounds himself with beautiful boys, though he remains, as far as I can tell, inthe company of the first: his contempt for the ‘wild gaping after just one’ may beprompted simply by the realisation that being concerned with the first boy doesnot exclude being concerned with others as well, not that being concerned withothers excludes being concerned with the first. The image of an older mansurrounded by and always in pursuit of beautiful boys—recall what we know ofSocrates in this connection!—is much more satisfying than the image of one who,after spending time with a particular boy, abandons boys altogether for theimpersonal feature their bodies have in common.28

The process continues. A still more philosophic lover will now understandthat the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body (210b–c). Twothings are worth noting here. First, since the lover is still focused on anindividual, it is reasonable to think that his focus was also on individuals when,at the previous stage, he turned to the beauty of the body in general. Second,bodily beauty remains relevant. The lover will be happy with a boy whose soul isbeautiful ‘even if he is only slightly blooming in his body’. The qualification isconcessive but positive. Plato has no sympathy for the commonplace of thebeautiful soul trapped in a wizened body: the external and the internal interact.Like everything else in the world, he writes in the Republic (401a), bodies can begraceful or inelegant, shapely or unshapely; inelegance and lack of rhythm orharmony are indications of an evil character while their opposites are indicationsof a character that is temperate and good.

Once again, Plato does not say what leads the lover to that realisation. Wemust guess once again. My own tentative guess, which takes a cue from theconnection between bodily and psychic beauty we were just discussing, is thatsince the beauty of soul or character, as I suggested earlier, is manifested in thebody, it affects the lover’s perception and allows him to find the person he lovesnot only, say, wise, sensitive or kind but also good-looking. In addition to thepassage above, a view of that sort may be suggested by the statement that while agood body does not affect the quality of the soul a good soul renders the body asgood as it can be (Rep. 403d) and an aside to the effect that it is not possible tocure the body if something is wrong with it without curing the soul (156e–157a).Although the evidence for that guess is slight, it has one great advantage: itallows the same reasoning to apply to the soul that earlier applied to the body.Just as the lover was led to the beauty of body in general by asking what makesone body beautiful, so now he is led to the soul by asking what makes the body ingeneral beautiful, the soul providing an explanation for the beauty of body ingeneral. That, incidentally, is also Plotinus’ view of the relationship between thebeauty of the body and the beauty of the soul: ‘It is the soul’, he writes, ‘that



makes every body that is called ‘beautiful’ what it is’.29 The questions continue:What makes the soul beautiful? The lover, in the company of the boys his loveaims to improve, realises that the greatest effect is due to law and custom, tooccupations and institutions—in a word, to the culture within which humanbeings are born and grow. Beautiful souls are the products of beautiful cultures,whose own beauty, too, is all of one and the same kind (210c). At that point—andat that point only—the lover comes to think that the beauty of the body is notonly inferior to the beauty of the soul but of little importance overall. And nowthe philosophical question can be asked again: when are laws and institutionsbeautiful? What makes them so? When, as Plato sees it, do they lead unerringlyto virtue and the good life? The answer is, when they have been established nothaphazardly and as tradition would have them but on the basis of knowledge (orscience: episteme, 210c–d)—precisely the knowledge for which Socrates had beensearching in Plato’s elenctic dialogues and the structure of which the Republicarticulates in such grand detail.

It is now, as the lover is looking at the beauty of the sciences, that he sees agreat expanse, a great ‘sea of beauty’ and stops caring for the beauty that ispresent in one thing only. Is Plato here, in marking a turn toward the Forms,which are the objects of knowledge and responsible for its own beauty, alsoturning away from any attachment to individuals? Yes, but only in part. Hewrites that the lover is no longer moved by ‘the beauty of a single thing, satisfiedlike a menial servant (oiketes) with the beauty of a boy, a man or a single kind ofbehavior, contemptible like a slave (douleuon) and of no consequence’ (210d). Hislanguage, which recalls Pausanias’ earlier description of the lover’s imploring fora boy’s favors, eager ‘to provide services (douleias) even a slave (doulos) wouldrefuse’ (183a), seems to me to suggest at least that at this stage (but no earlier) thelover is no longer interested in sex and perhaps that he no longer has a specialrelationship with any particular boy. But we have no reason for thinking that thelover is no longer interested in interacting with the beautiful boys who havebecome his companions or in expanding his circle—exactly like Socrates, who,Alcibiades will soon be telling the company, ‘is crazy (erotikos diakeitai) aboutbeautiful boys and constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze’ (216d).The ‘gloriously beautiful’ logoi to which this truly philosophical lover gives birth(210d) are not first reached by him in isolation and only then (contingently, so tospeak) communicated to others. Although, like everyone else, the philosopherneeds time alone for his studies, surely part of his activity consists of hisdialectical interaction with his circle. Becoming aware that they are beautiful forthe same reason that so many other things in the world are beautiful, allowing hislove to encompass everything that manifests, to some degree, the intelligibleorder of the Forms, need not in any way interfere with his concern for them.The philosopher does not pay for the expansion of his vision with a counter-vailing blindness.30

On the contrary, he finally grasps the cause of the beauty of the Forms—theForm of beauty itself—which is also the ultimate cause of the beauty of absolutelyeverything in the world; in a serious sense, as the philosopher gains a vision of



the Form of beauty, he falls in love with the world itself. That is the beauty thecontemplation of which is the only thing that makes human life worth living, ifanything does (211d1–2). It is the contemplation that is characteristic of thephilosopher who understands that the world is organised in the best and mostbeautiful way possible—the contemplation that, instead of being purely abstractand theoretical, enables him to give birth to virtue itself and become dear to thegods and so vitally important to his fellow human beings that he comes as closeto being immortal as any human being ever does (211e–212a). His are the bestchildren a human being can have.

Plato’s account is based on a metaphysics according to which—in line withthe principle that the cause is greater than its effect, which implies, as Aristotlesays, that fire is the hottest thing of all since it is the cause of the heat ofeverything else31—what explains the beauty of something is more beautiful thanthe object whose beauty it explains. Add to that the idea that beauty andgoodness are, if not identical, essentially related to each other, and the success oferotic attraction (at least when it is, by Plato’s standards, correctly pursued) isguaranteed. In the presence of the greatest beauty, which is also the greatestgoodness, the philosopher has the best and most beautiful life a human beingcan have. The philosopher’s ascent is a continuing effort to understand thebeauty of the objects of eros, an effort to determine what accounts for it. It isinseparable from the production of the most beautiful and good logoi, whichare the other side of his vision and as crucial to its perfection as that visionitself.

This movement, this constant going forward with questions that are not yetanswered and which Plato was the first to describe, is in my opinion absolutelyessential to love. Divorced from Plato’s metaphysics, it need not be seen as anascent toward objects of greater value. I think it is sparked by feeling that there ismore to the beautiful things we love than we have seen so far and kindled by thedesire to come to know them better. But for me beauty, which depends not onlyon the features of the object of love but also on who it is that loves it, has noessential connection to virtue. Although I expect that a beautiful thing willsomehow make my life better, I have no guarantee that I am right. That can bedetermined only in the course of time—if my interaction with it and how I havechanged as a result prove to have been themselves worthwhile. But what is andwhat is not worthwhile, what valuable or harmful, is known only in retrospectand sometimes provokes intractable disagreement. You think the person I havespent my life with has sucked out all that was once good in me, that my friendhas debauched me, that television has corrupted my standard of taste. I feelperfectly happy and justified (I wish it was as simple as that) and sometimes wesimply have to leave the matter there.

Has television corrupted me? Well, I think that it has enabled me to producesome decent philosophy. But for you my idea that your contempt of television is aversion of Plato’s rejection of Homer and Aeschylus is as repulsive as televisionitself and my essay on the genius of St. Elsewhere is a disgrace. How are we todecide? How can I decide, for that matter? Before I was attracted to television,



I found it despicable; I looked at those who enjoyed it with a mixture of pity andscorn. Now I am finally able to see its good points—or am I? I believe that, otherthings being equal, I am now better off than I was then. But how can I tell, since,along with a taste for television I have also developed standards of judgmentwhich, from the point of view of my earlier self, are depraved and corrupt? Bymy earlier standards, I am now depraved, corrupt and miserable although I don’tknow it. By those I currently accept, my earlier standards were silly, prejudicedand deprived me of great beauty. Which standards are right?

Plato, for whom no disagreement is ultimately intractable, answers: thestandards of philosophy, the only standards that establish when a life has beenworthwhile. And what they say is that life is worth living only in thecontemplation of beauty, which manifests itself in giving birth to kaloi logoi, thebeautiful accounts and actions that promote virtue and happiness.

Whether or not one accepts this Platonic commitment, what he calls thecontemplation (theasthai) of beauty is not at any stage a passive affair; it requiresthe creation of something beautiful. And that is exactly what I was driving atearlier when I said that we are constantly trying to see what we love in new waysthat are distinctly our own. Those who succeed, especially if their variousinterpretations, their logoi, are systematically connected with one another, canbecome beautiful in their own right, objects that others may love and may wantto come to know for themselves. Unlike Plato, I don’t believe that thelover’s beautiful logoi necessarily result in the creation of virtue and for thatreason, although I do agree that they result in the creation of more beauty,I think that they contain an element of ineliminable risk. But, like him, I amconvinced that beauty is a spur to creation. And, instead of seeing it as aninfallible guide, I prefer to think of it somewhat as Stendhal did: beauty, theobject of love, is ‘only a promise of happiness’, not always fulfilled. Sometimes, itmay be worse when it is, because by then I may have become incapable of seeingthe harm—aesthetic or ethical—it has done me or others. But sometimes itspromise comes true and a new beauty, a new spur to creation, enters the world. Itis in that case that one can say, and say truly, that, quite apart from its moralworth, one’s life was a life worth living, that one is happy to have become whoone is.

That is in many respects also the view of the Symposium. A beautiful boy andwhat love makes him want to do for him set the philosopher on the way tobeauty itself, to the creation of the most beautiful logoi, which constitute the otherface of virtue itself and make them both more beautiful. These logoi give thephilosopher an immortality which has nothing to do with the fame to which thelower mysteries are directed. It depends only on the inherent quality of his lifeand work.

But Plato’s stunning vision has reached us because the Symposium has beendrawing swarms of interpreters, all of them eager to find something that is purelytheir own and put their own stamp upon it. Socrates, whose logoi it describes, andPlato, whose logos it is, are no less famous than Homer or Hesiod, Lycurgus orSolon (209d–e), partly because the Symposium has proved inexhaustible. Perhaps



the life the Symposium honours is not the best life there is, because there is no besthuman life, and perhaps it is not the only good human life, which is why Homer,for one, stands by Plato’s side today. But if to be beautiful is to provoke thecreation of beauty, the proliferation of beautiful logoi, then, whether or not it hasever led any of its readers to virtue, little can be compared to the beauty of theSymposium. It has proved to be an offspring of which Plato can rightly be proud.

Alexander NehamasRoom 120, 1879 HallPrinceton [email protected]

NOTES

1 This is a revised text of the annual European Journal of Philosophy lecture delivered atthe Humboldt University in Berlin in May of 2006. I am grateful to the editorial board ofthe Journal, particularly to Professors Robert Stern and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, for theirinvitation and their generous hospitality and to Dr Dina Emundts for overseeing thepractical arrangements. An invitation to give the Gray Lectures at Cambridge Universityin April of 2004 was the first cause of these ideas, which are part of a continuing project.I cannot overstate my indebtedness to the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge andparticularly to Professors Richard Hunter, Malcolm Schofield and David Sedley and DrsDominic Scott, Frisbee Sheffield and Robert Wardy. I have presented various versions ofthis lecture at several institutions and I have gained much from my discussions there.

2 Vlastos 1981.3 Brentlinger 1970 and Keller 2000, for example, have denied that loving someone

because of their features implies that love is directed at their features and not at them.Kolodny 2003 claims that such a ‘quality’ theory of love is to be rejected although he doesnot address directly views like Brentlinger’s or Keller’s. See also Velleman 1999: 362–364.

4 Nietzsche 1968: 467.5 ‘When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and he must

think that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it’ (210b5–6); cf.Price 1989: 39.

6 This passage is discussed much less often than it deserves, especially by those whofind in Socrates’ speech an impersonal, almost inhuman sort of love, despite the fact thatmost translations I have consulted render the passage correctly. One scholar, however,translates it ambiguously, allowing such an impersonal reading to insinuate itself in thereaders’s mind as if it was part of Plato’s text and not the product of a wilful interpretation:the lover, according to Nussbaum 1986: 179, ‘sees that he ‘must set himself up as the loverof all beautiful bodies, and relax his excessively intense passion for one body, lookingdown on that and thinking it of small importance’—leaving it unclear whether ‘that’ and‘it’ refer to the lover’s passion for one body or that body itself. That makes it easier tocharge the passage, on the assumption that ‘all beauty, qua beauty, is uniform, the same inkind’, with advising the lover to abandon the beauty of the boy’s body for the beauty of thebody in general and, worse, with ‘making the related the same, the irreplaceablereplaceable’.



7 Mozart, Don Giovanni, Act I, Scene 4: ‘Nella bionda, egli ha l’usanza/Di lodar lagentilezza—/Nella bruna, la constanza,/Nella bianca, la dolcezza! [etc.]’. Some may think,of course, that the Don falsifies his experience simply in order to add more conquests to his‘list’, but his attitude is in fact much more complex. With a comic twist, he echoes Socrates’description of Glaucon when he justifies his deceptions by attributing all of them to love:‘Whoever is faithful to one betrays the others. I, whose emotions encompass all, love themall without exception’ (II.1). Is he a hypocrite? The difficulty of answering that question ispart of the reason the opera continues to be fascinating. The details of the connectionbetween Plato and Mozart are as follows: Socrates’ point appears transposed in Lucretius’De Rerum Natura, IV.1160–1170 (‘nigra melichrus est, inmunda et fetida acosmos [etc.]’), isused by Moliere in The Misanthrope, II. 4 (‘La pale est aux jasmins en blancheurcomparable; la noire a faire peur, une brune adorable [etc.]’) and is adapted, along with theDon’s little disquisition on faith and faithlessness in Moliere’s Don Juan (I. 217–225), by daPonte.

8 Price 1989: 46–47.9 That is not Socrates’ place on Plato’s ladder of love. Alcibiades’ story about Socrates’

refusal to have sex with him (218d–219d) shows that Socrates, if we are to find a place onPlato’s ladder for him at all, has reached at least the stage where the beauty of laws andinstitutions has become apparent, since only then, as we shall see, do lovers realise ‘thatthe beauty of bodies is unimportant, (smikron ti, 210c3–6) and only then do they begin togive sex a secondary role in their relationships.

10 Price 1989: 47 suggests both responses. Regarding the first, I can’t agree with himthat the lover’s ‘attachment to one body only produced words’—either in the caseof the lovers or fame or in that of the beginning lovers of wisdom. He intimates the secondwhen he writes, in connection with the passage of the Republic we discussed above,that ‘the generosity of response [of the philopais] should inspire in a man pregnant insoul a non-particularised love-poetry inspired by, and intended for, ingenuous youth ingeneral’.

11 Vlastos 1981: 23.12 See Liddell and Scott 1968: s.v. mikros, I. 3.13 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, II. v. 26.14 One might be tempted to take the idea that everyone is pregnant both in body and

in soul less literally in view of 208e ff., where Plato seems to contrast ‘those who arepregnant in body’ with ‘those who are pregnant in soul’ (hoi men . . . hoi de). But a glance atwhat follows dispels that impression, since when Plato explains who these latter peopleare he claims that ‘there surely are those who are even more (eti mallon) pregnant in theirsouls than in their bodies’ (209a1–2). The difference remains one in degree.

15 Does this show that every lover who belongs to this second level of eros is a man?Perhaps. But one of three examples by means of which Diotima introduces that categorycomes from the story of Alcestis, who offered to die in place of her husband, Admetus.Like Achilles and Codrus (the other two examples) Alcestis sacrifices herself so that ‘thememory of [her] virtue should be immortal’. On the other hand, everyone to whom Platorefers as worthy of fame on account of ethical or intellectual accomplishment in whatfollows is a man. Perhaps he is making an implicit distinction between courage and theother ethical virtues.

16 Plato makes explicit provisions for the sexual and reproductive life of the guardiansin the Republic (457b–462a, and note in particular 458c–d). Guardians and philosophers aretemperate but by no means celibate.

17 Philonikon and philotimon, Rep. 581b.



18 Philomathes and philosophon, Rep. 581b.19 Plato may be joking when he calculates that the life of the virtuous king is 729 times

more pleasant than the life of the tyrant (Rep. 587e), but his desire to determine which ofthe three kinds of life (each corresponding to the dominance of a different part of the soul)is most pleasant (576b–588a) implies that the pleasures involved are the same in kind anddiffer only in degree. It is also important to note, however, that (as Dominic Scott remindedme) that eros in the Republic is by no means unequivocally a good. It is associated with thelawless and vicious desires Plato discusses in the opening pages of Book VIII and it is soclosely linked to the passions of the tyrannical type of man—the lowest human type inPlato’s eyes—that it is twice described as ‘eros tyrannos’—‘eros the tyrant’ (572e–573e).Unfortunately, Plato has little to say about this double aspect of the character of eros, just ashe says nothing about the double aspect of the ‘madness’ (mania) with which he connectsit—vicious here yet one of the gods’ greatest gifts at Phdr. 245b–c.

20 Some of these obscurities are well discussed in Burnyeat 1977.21 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Book I, Chapter 16.22 More on this bald claim and the general model of love and beauty on which it

depends in Nehamas 2007: 53–63.23 Not even as parents love their children, if the controversial understanding of love in

Frankfurt 2004 is correct.24 Catullus, Carmina, 85.25 One peculiar but suggestive asymmetry between love and hate, which suggests that

they are not contraries, is that while it is impossible to fall in love with someone withwhom you have never had any direct contact (which includes letters from or pictures ofthat person), simply on information supplied to you by a third party, it is quite possible tocome to hate another through an account of their personality or actions.

26 Allende 1994: 48–49: ‘The first time I saw my Tıo Ramon, I thought my mother wasplaying a joke. That was the prince she had been sighing over? I had never seen such anugly man. . . . [T]en years later . . . I was at last able to accept him. He took charge of uschildren, just he had promised. . . . He raised us with a firm hand and unfailing goodhumor; he set limits and sent clear messages, without sentimental demonstrations,without compromise. I recognise now that he put up with my contrariness without tryingto buy my esteem or ceding an inch of his authority, until he won me over totally. He is theonly father I have known, and now I think he is really handsome!’.

27 Flaubert 2004: 157, 165.28 Difficult questions lurk in this area. A lover who stopped here, thinking that

nothing further is needed for explaining the beauty of boys, would be not a philosopherbut what the Republic (474c–480a) describes, in contrast to the philosopher, a ‘lover ofsights’ (philotheamon). That is presumably because such a man would think that theexplanation for the beauty of other things, if any, would also stop with what is common tothem without trying to connect the two explanations together. In some sense, then, thebeauty that is common to all bodies is perceptible and not the proper province ofphilosophy—at this stage, the lover has not yet shown himself to be a philosopher. Whendoes that happen? The most plausible stage seems to be when the lover leaves ‘laws andinstitutions’ behind and turns to the beauty of knowledge (210c–d). At that point, concernfor the body disappears and the term enters this context for the first time: the lover’senterprise is described as ‘copious’ (aphthonos) philosophy. But it is only at the very finalstage, when the lover becomes aware of the Form of Beauty, that he also understands themany ways in which it differs from every other beautiful object and acquires theknowledge which, less explicitly, Plato attributes to the philosopher in the Republic.



29 Plotinus Enneads I.6.7.29–30. See the commentary of Kalligas 1994: 272. Plotinuscredits the soul with the beauty of epitedeumata as well, while for Plato ‘laws andepitedeumata’ follow the soul on the next higher step of the ladder of love. I believe theconflict can be resolved if we understand Plotinus to take that term to refer to behavior orpatterns of behavior, which he considers sensible objects, while Plato understands it in thesense of custom or institution.

30 The idea that the philosophic lover maintains, like Socrates, his relations with someindividuals is given further support by the statement that what brings the philosopher tothe Form of beauty is ‘the correct practice of paederasty’ (211b), by which, I suspect, Platohas in mind relationships not exclusively organised around sexuality. In this and severalother points, I have learned much from Price 1989. I may, however, have proved anunworthy student, since Price thinks that the idea that the lover expands the range of hispurview without any attendant loss, is ‘quite false to the text’ (45).

31 Aristotle, Metaphysics a, 993b23–31. Aristotle uses that example, which he takesto be obvious to common sense, in order to argue that the principles of being, whichphilosophy investigates and are the source of the truth of everything that is, are the truestthings there are.

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Allende, I. (1994), Paula, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: HarperCollins.Brentlinger, J. (1970), ‘The Nature of Love’, in ‘The Symposium’ of Plato, trans. Suzy Q.

Groden. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 1970: 113–129.Burnyeat, M. F. (1977), ‘Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration’, Bulletin of the Institute for

Classical Studies, 24: 7–17.Flaubert, G. (2004), Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Frankfurt, H. (2004), The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Keller, S. (2000), ‘How Do I Love Thee: Let Me Count the Properties’, American Philosophical

Quarterly, 37: 163–172.Kalligas, P. (1994), Plotinou Enneas Prote. Athens: Center for the Publication of Works by

Greek Authors of the Academy of Athens.Kolodny, N. (2003), ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’, The Philosophical Review, 112: 135–189.Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R. (1968), A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon

Press.Nehamas, A. (2007), Only a Promise of Happiness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Nietzsche, F. (1968), Twilight of the Idols, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche.

New York: Viking.Nussbaum, M. C. (1986), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and

Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Price, A. W. (1989), Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Velleman, J. D., ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Ethics, 109: 228–374.Vlastos, G. (1981), ‘The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato’, in his Platonic Studies, 2nd

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Nehamas Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Symposium 211d

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