Last month, celebrities got together for divorce, such as Shuang Song, Gao Yunxiang and Dong Xuan, WenWen and Ma Yili. Some celebrity divorces make netizens lament that they "don't believe in love anymore", and some make netizens shout "it is long overdue". We should never maliciously speculate on people's motivations, so suppose that celebrities also marry for love, not for some commercial purpose. So the question is, what makes the two people who were originally in love end up being strangers?
Naturally, we don't stop at answers such as "time has faded emotionally", "derailment", etc., we want to understand something deeper, that is, what is love? Is it true that most "love" has a warranty period and cannot last long after all? We may be able to draw on plato's intellectual resources to explore this question.
Plato believed that if we wanted to inquire into "what is love," then our first question of thought should be "what is the most perfect love," or "what should the ideal love look like?"
To explore something from the point of view of the "ideal version" of the thing is Plato's mode of thinking. When Plato spoke of the ideal version, he used the term "the forms" to refer to it. We can also understand "rational" as the "essence" of things. Essence is the opposite of "phenomenon". Plato believed that what we see is that things are merely facsimiles of the rational type, for example, an enviable love in reality is only a facsimile of the rational type of love.
It can be understood in this way that rational forms are what things should be. By understanding what a thing should be like, we can discern more clearly what is right and what is wrong, and then notice what we should do to make the world a little bit better.
Plato divided the world into the realm of theoretic and the realm of phenomena. The phenomenal world is the world we live in that is uncertain and full of regrets. The rational world is a perfect, unchanging, eternal world. Although the world we live in has many unbearable conditions, this imperfect world is also based on the perfect rational world as a template.
In Plato's view, the relationship between the rational type of love and the love in reality is: the rational type of love is the template and prototype of love in reality. Love in reality becomes beautiful by imitating the rational shape of love. Beautiful love needs couples to manage it together, but how should it be managed? Plato believed that couples should manage their love by imitating the rationale of love.
Just as a craftsman wants to create a sculpture, he does not start carving casually, he will carve against a template made by a master and check whether he is carving correctly. This is Plato's basic concept of the "rational type".
If you have a rational type, then you can be directed to the right purpose.
Rational form, in Plato's eyes, is a blueprint, a set of best guidelines for guiding a thing to the best extent possible. Therefore, the theory of love is a set of guidelines to guide people in reality to achieve a happy ending to love.
That's why we need to think hard about rational types, in order to be able to guide us in life.
Most people probably think that the rationale of love is a kind of utopian love, ignoring many of the problems that exist in love in reality. One might think that the rationale of love is the antithesis of real love.
But Plato believed that the rationale of love was precisely a profound understanding of the reality of love.
So what did Plato think of as the rationale of love?
We can get a glimpse of one or two from the "Drinking Chapter":
(1) Two people who truly love each other will become brave for each other and be willing to sacrifice their lives for each other.
(2) The ideal lover will not be excessively indulged in carnal sensuality, but more of a soul that loves the other, hoping to gain virtue from the lover. The rationale of love is that the soul rules over the carnal desires, not the carnal desires that suppress the soul.
(3) Rational love is man's pursuit of his own perfection.
In The Drinking Session, Aristophanes tells a famous mythological story:
Once upon a time there were three kinds of people in the world: men, women, and men and women. The original man was spherical, with a rounded back and sides, two identical faces, and twice as many other organs as the body as today's humans. They were very strong and energetic, and wanted to compete with the gods, so Zeus and the gods negotiated a way to deal with people—to split people in half, so that people's abilities were only half as strong, so that they no longer posed a threat to the gods. Because human beings are originally one, the two halves that are separated will miss each other and try to reunite and return to the original whole and health.
Finally, Aristophanes concluded that men and women all over the world can realize their love only if they find a lover who is compatible with them, so love is not to be happy in the flesh, but to make the desire to be divided and united to be fulfilled.
(4) In the rational form of love, both parties will show good virtues.
In the Drinking Book, Agathorn discusses the virtues of loving God:
Eros is righteous and will not use violence no matter what it does; Eros is wise and can rule pleasure and lust calmly; Eros is brave and can rule over the invincible brave; Eros is wise and has infinite creativity; Eros is good, eliminating barriers, and creating fraternity. In Agaton's view, the love of God itself is the most beautiful, the best, and love is the source of all virtues.
(5) In the rational form of love, people chase after the beauty they lack.
In Greek mythology, Eros, the god of love, is a combination of the god of resources and the god of poverty, so that the god of love inherits the poverty, ugliness, sloppiness and homelessness of his mother, and inherits the temperament of his father, so he strongly desires all good and beautiful things——— courage, perseverance, and wit. In the strict sense, Eros is not God, and in Plato's Dialogues, Eros is a spirit between man and God, and does not possess the perfection and full goodness of God. What Eros Seeks is exactly what He lacks. therefore. The nature of love also contains a desire for the good things that it lacks.
(6) The rational form of love is composed of the love desire of the body and the soul.
While emphasizing the importance of the soul's love, Plato also agreed with the necessity of the existence of the body's love, but the love of the soul was to rule over the love of the body. In addition to wisdom and bravery, the soul has a virtue, that is, moderation. Although the desire for love in the body is not shameful and low-level, the soul must be allowed to control the desires of the body and make them restrained.
(7) In Plato's eyes, the rationale of love exists between intelligent adult men and handsome underage men.
At the end of The Drink, Socrates' lover's admiration for him can be said to be a true portrayal of "platonic love." Socrates' lover was a beautiful teenager, and the reason why he fell in love with the ugly and informal Socrates was precisely because he was touched by his personality charm and was impressed by the goodness of Socrates' soul and his wisdom. This is also the embodiment of point (5), chasing the beauty of what you may lack. The ugly Socrates longed for the beauty of the handsome boy, and the ignorant boy longed for the wisdom of Socrates.
All in all, from the "Drinking Chapter" we can see that "platonic love", that is, the characteristics of the rational type of love, are expressed as follows:
“
(1) The three virtues of the soul: the pursuit of wisdom, the temperance of carnal desires, and the courage to sacrifice oneself for the other;
(2) Make yourself perfect, pursue the beauty that you or lack, and make yourself a complete person.
”
bibliography 1. Fan Liping. "Platonic Love": A Distorted View of Love by Later Generations[j]. Hebei Academic Journal, 2004(05): 77-80. 2. Wang Xuya. Exploring "Platonic Love" from "Drinking"[j]. Comparative Research on Cultural Innovation,2018,2(12):83-84. 3. Xie Wenyu. Reason and Destiny in Plato's Truth Complex: On Plato's "Unfinished Literary Theory"[j]. Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2016, 53(02): 39-51.