Desire Informing Philosophy in Plato: The Lover, the Tyrant, and the Citizen

<p>Desire informs the good and examined life by giving meaning to and requiring training for human drives. In investigating Plato’s dialogues for how desire informs philosophy, comparison gives way to a genealogical hermeneutic; the obvious want to find changes or discrepancies in Plato’s texts, and Socrates’ words, gives way to interpreting congruent transformations of thought throughout his corpus. Specifically, this thesis evaluates desire’s multitude of signification and significance through the following the chronology: <em>Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Statesman, and Laws</em>. That human failing and ambition equally find desire couched between lack and satiation is radically reconsidered in the course of the <em>Symposium</em> to aim eros towards the possession of the forever good through love of the beautiful. The <em>Phaedrus</em> unites soulful love of the forms of beauty, temperance, and justice in heaven with standards for soul-leading through the pitfalls of philosophy on earth; in this reading, while desire is contingent for knowledge acquisition, the rigors of philosophy require desire to undergo conscious measures of discipline. The erotic dialogues tend to posit eros in an exceptional capacity. Holding eros to exceptional standards is corroborated by Socrates’ warnings in the <em>Republic</em> to any erotically inclined person to beware tyrannical behaviors and nature. Yet the whole picture of eros left impressed upon the reader of the <em>Republic</em> is complicated by the way in which eros is accounted for in the beautiful city, diminished by the tripartite soul, and mitigated by the interlocutors themselves. Though some political consequences of eros for the philosopher-rulers in the beautiful city is fleshed out by the <em>Statesman</em>’s myth of two ages, where the condition of desire both opposes itself to an automatic existence wrought by the gods of the ideal age and makes love of wisdom possible, it is the emergence of the statesman’s ability to rule by recollection and absence of the divine ideal that the presence of desire and volition in our present condition becomes politically pronounced. In the <em>Laws</em>, Plato’s moral psychology is expanded from the theoretical ambitions of the tripartite city/soul to the tangible bipartisan division between pleasure and pain in order to permit the ordinary citizen of the demos that chance to live the good and examined life. All in all, desire in general wills itself towards specific desire for wisdom, especially when one confronts the ineffable.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Master

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Liberal Studies

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2022

Author dc:creator

• Bagrow, Christian P

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Marie Marianetti

• History of Philosophy
• Plato
• Symposium
• Phaedrus
• Republic
• Statesman
• Laws

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5022

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-6141