Charles Hartshorne was fond of
indicating the themes in Plato’s later works that anticipate dipolar
theism. Daniel Dombrowski recently argued forcefully for Hartshorne’s
view (Dombrowski 2005). Neither philosopher notes the affinities between
process thought and the metaphysics of eros as expressed in the
penultimate speech in Plato’s Symposium. In that speech, Socrates
relates ideas on the nature of love which he attributes to Diotima of
Mantinea, a woman he identifies as his teacher. Not only are Diotima’s
views uncharacteristic of what commonly passes for Platonism, they can
be construed as a version of process philosophy. It is true that she
uses the language of the theory of Forms, recollection, and divine
immutability. On the other hand, she denies the immortality of the soul
and the strict identity of a person over time. The elenchus
implicit in Diotima’s argument is that a merely self-interest theory of
motivation is self-defeating. The mortal creature longs to possess the
beautiful forever; but its very mortality makes this impossible. The
desire for immortality is satisfied by giving “birth in beauty, whether
of body or of soul” for those who may remember us and enjoy it after we
are gone. Diotima stops short of the process view that the creatures
contribute to an all-inclusive divine being-in-becoming. Nevertheless,
the trajectory of her thinking brings her to the threshold of the ideas
that perfect love involves ideal forms of both activity and passivity.
I have no interest in taking sides on
whether the views expressed by Diotima are ones that Plato endorsed.
Whitehead observed, “No two of [Plato’s] dialogues are completely
consistent with each other” (1968, 210).
What Whitehead says of the relations among the dialogues applies to
Symposium as a single work, for it incorporates dialogue within
differing, sometimes conflicting, views on the nature of love expressed
by each participant. Even Alcibiades, who praises Socrates, can be
construed as criticizing the views of love that Socrates has just
expressed (Nussbaum 1979). Dombrowski argues that there is an asymmetry
in Plato’s writings in which claims in the earlier stages are criticized
at later stages. Here again, Symposium as a single work
illustrates this more general pattern, for each speech, excluding that
of Alcibiades, seems be a constructive appropriation of the one that
preceded it. It may be possible, as Dombrowski believes, to identify
Plato’s voice beneath the palimpsest of the dialogue format. The
argument I make here, however, does not depend on reconstructing Plato’s
views. It is enough to agree with Whitehead when he says that Plato’s
writings are “an inexhaustible mine of suggestion” (1978, 39).
As I bypass the question of what Plato
thought, so I leave aside the enigma of Diotima—whether she existed,
what relation she has to Socrates, and why Plato introduced her into the
dialogue.
Although I shall refer to Diotima as though she were a historical
figure, I should not be construed as weighing in, one or another, on
whether she was. Andrea Nye calls Diotima the “hidden host” at the
banquet. I prefer to think of her as a dimension of Plato that has been
obscured by not taking seriously enough Plato’s overtures to process
metaphysics, of which she is one of the best representatives. Whitehead
remarks, “Plato raises all fundamental questions without answering them”
(1968, 117). This may be an overstatement, but Diotima’s speech is a
largely neglected answer to life’s meaning that deserves more attention.
I begin by outlining Diotima’s views and commenting on the ways in which
they diverge from standard accounts of “Platonism.” Following this, I
turn to the question of the extent to which Diotima articulates a
process metaphysics, especially as it relates to divine love.
Diotima on the
Nature of Eros
Diotima’s views are set against the backdrop of Hellenistic mythology.
Hesiod identified Eros as one of the oldest gods, a personification of
cosmic forces making for harmony and order. However, Eros was most
commonly identified as a youthful, beautiful, and sometimes mischievous
boy. He was usually said to be the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of
beauty and sexual desire, although some accounts make him simply her
occasional companion, or even one of the gods who greeted her after she
was born from the foam of the sea. Common to the myths and legends
surrounding Eros is the idea of the nearly irresistible power that he
has over both gods and mortals. Zeus himself is not immune to the power
of Eros. In later mythological accounts (circa 2nd century CE), Eros
himself paradoxically falls victim to the powers of love, as is related
in the charming tale of Eros and Psyche (Hamilton, 92-100). Eros was
often portrayed as blindfolded. While under the power of Eros, reason is
suspended and one succumbs to a kind of divine madness (New Larousse,
132).
In
contrast to the traditional views of eros, Diotima weaves her own
mythology of its origins. On the day of Aphrodite’s birth, she says,
Poros, the god of plenty, the son of Metis, goddess of cunning, became
drunk and fell asleep. Penia, goddess of poverty, in order to relieve
her lack of resources, lay down with Poros and conceived and gave birth
to Eros. Diotima explains that, being the child of poverty, Eros always
lacks for something. In contrast to the poets who think of Eros as a
beautiful lad, Diotima says,
[He] is
tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying on the dirt
without a bed, sleeping at gates and in roadways under the sky,
having his mother’s nature, always living with Need (203d).
Having been born on
Aphrodite’s birthday, Eros is her constant companion, and it is she
(that is, Beauty) for whom he longs. Because Eros is son of Plenty and
the grandson of Cunning, he is ever resourceful and persistent in his
pursuit of Beauty. Diotima also says that because Eros is a lover of
what is beautiful, he is a lover of wisdom. Thus, inherent in his nature
is a rationality that seeks out the beautiful.
In
constructing her own mythology of love Diotima demonstrates that she is
aware of the limitations of any merely mythic account of love. Her myth
is specifically designed to counter what she takes to be mistaken views
of love in Hellenistic thought and to clothe her own views in the
familiar fabric of theogeny. Insofar as one is interested in justifying
one’s views, however, myth provides at best conflicting stories and at
worst the blind clash of doctrines. Plato was aware of the limitations
of any merely mythic account. The Euthyphro is, among other
things, a classic parody of those who use myths and sacred texts as
proof-texts (cf. Euthyphro 6b-c). Thus, Diotima moves from
mythos to logos, from mythology to reasoned discourse.
If
Diotima’s theogeny of Eros remythologizes the nature of love, her
philosophy can be thought of as a demythologization of eros
to show how it figures into her own philosophical soteriology. Diotima
argues that, contrary to established Hellenistic tradition, love is not
a god. She brings Socrates to this conclusion by an argument which I
reconstruct as follows:
1. Love is a relative term that
implies a lover and a beloved (an object of love). Put
differently, love is always love of something (200a).
2. The lover desires to possess the
beloved.
3. It is impossible to desire to
possess what one already possesses (200b).
4. The beloved is whatever is good or
beautiful (201b). One does not love what is deformed or bad.
4. To be divine is to be in possession
of what is beautiful and good.
5. Therefore, love is not a god; put
differently, no god is love.
Premise 2 is
assumed without argument and neither Socrates nor Diotima doubt the
truth of 4. An objection to the third premise is that people seem to
love what they possess. Can a millionaire not love money? Diotima
addresses this apparent counter-example by saying that millionaires
cannot desire what they already have, but they can desire to continually
possess it or to acquire more of it. The object of a millionaire’s
desire is to continue to possess this money, or perhaps to make
additions to it.
Anders
Nygren famously argued that love, as Diotima describes it, is
acquisitive and any form of altruistic love is incompatible with her
view. To revert to the example of the millionaire, suppose he or she is
overcome with compassion for the poor and disadvantaged and becomes a
philanthropist. How could this be an example of eros? On Nygren’s
reading of Diotima, philanthropy cannot be an instance of eros.
Following G. Simmel, Nygren calls eros a Will-to-Possess. “Plato
is fundamentally unaware of any other form of love than acquisitive
love,” and “any thought of Eros as freely giving anything away” is a
“contradiction in terms” (Nygren, 176). This is a main support of
Nygren’s claim that agape and eros are irreconcilable
fundamental motifs concerning the relation between the human and the
divine. According to Nygren, agape and eros are “in actual
conflict with one another” (Nygren, 56); agape is the fundamental
Christian motif whereas eros is fundamentally non-Christian
(Nygren, 39); indeed, Eros-piety is Christianity’s “most dangerous
rival” (Nygren, 162).
Nygren’s view is plausible in light of premise 2 of Diotima’s argument.
A proper response to Nygren requires that we look more closely at the
way Diotima characterizes love. Andrea Nye points out that the
expression “to come to be for someone” (204d) is often translated so as
to imply acquisitiveness. Thus, in answer to the question “What is it
that the lover wants?” various translations read: “to possess [beautiful
things] for himself” (Allen, 148), “to possess [beauty]” (Griffith), “to
attain possession of beautiful things” (Hamilton, 84), “to get
[beautiful things]” (Rouse, 100), and “the property and possession of
[beautiful things] (Shelley, 40). In contrast to these translations Nye
argues that the Greek be read as saying that what we as lovers want is
“the beautiful to come into being for us” (Nye, 48).
Nye’s
interpretation and translation more nearly reflect the meaning of love
as Diotima explains it. According to Diotima, the desire embodied in
eros is a desire that the good and the beautiful be ours forever
(206a). This desire amounts to the desire for immortality (207a). In one
important respect, this desire is impossible to fulfill since we are, by
nature, mortal. She says, however, that a kind of immortality is
available to a mortal through procreation. For Diotima, the desire for
immortality finds its characteristic manifestation in the yearning to
give “birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul” (206b). She says that
Eileithuia, the goddess who presides at childbirth, is really Beauty
(206d). The creation of new forms of beauty is what “mortals have in
place of immortality” (207a). On a physical level eros results in
the conceiving and rearing of children. At another level, eros
issues in the creation of beautiful deeds, ideas, and forms of just
government—a kind of spiritual parturition. These are the children of
the soul just as sons and daughters are children of the body. In this
connection, Diotima mentions the poets Homer and Hesiod and the founders
of the Spartan and Athenian laws, Lycurgas and Solon (209d). The
immortality achieved through spiritual parturition is that one’s virtue
lives on in the memory of those who follow (208d-e).
The
pregnancy and birthing metaphors illustrate that eros, as Diotima
understands it, is not fundamentally acquisitive. If eros is the
desire to give “birth in beauty, whether in body or soul,” then it is
not a Will-to-Possess as much as it is a Will-to-Express
in ways that transcend an acquisitive impulse. Diotima sees this sort of
eros at work even within the animal kingdom. Wild animals, she
says, are first sick for intercourse with each other, then for nurturing
their young—for their sake the weakest animals stand ready to do battle
against the strongest and even to die for them, and they may be racked
with famine in order to feed their young (207b). For Diotima altruism is
as natural as self-interest, whether for animals or for humans. To
claim, as Nygren does, that any thought of eros “giving away” is
self-contradictory is a mistake. On the contrary, Diotima would argue
that “giving away” is of the essence of eros. To return to our
previous example, insofar as the philanthropic millionaire is driven by
a vision of how the beautiful and the good can be realized for others,
he or she is fulfilling an “erotic” yearning.
Diotima
does not deny that eros can be a desire to create beauty within
one’s own life. But this desire is arguably a special case of the more
general yearning to create beauty that outlasts the present moment.
Diotima denies that there is an ego-substance that remains
self-identical through all changes. She says,
Even
while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a
person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an
old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though
he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in
other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones
and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his
soul too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires,
pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same, but some are
coming to be in him while others are passing away (207d-e).
Our mortality,
which prevents the everlasting possession of the beautiful, is more
profound than we might at first have expected, for we are constantly
being reborn as a partly new self, both physically and mentally. If this
is correct then personal identity is the extent to which the inertia of
past and present selves carries over into future selves. On this account
of personal identity, eros could be acquisitive in the sense of
living only for oneself, but without an ego-substance to serve as the
locus of possessive desire, the Will-to-Possess would be a metaphysical
surd, a point that was not lost on the Buddhists.
Diotima and
Standard Platonism
What
commonly passes as Plato’s views I will call standard Platonism; it is
what many of us learned in our first philosophy class. Standard
Platonism holds that the soul is a divine spark within us that is
naturally immortal (Phaedo 106e). It exists prior to one’s birth
at which time it possessed knowledge it would later “recollect” (Phaedo
72e ff; Meno 82b-85b) and it will continue to exist after death
either in reincarnated form (Phaedo 81e; Timaeus 42b-c) or
as a spirit liberated from the bonds of physical existence (Phaedo
67a ff; Apology 41a ff). For standard Platonism, the body is a
kind of material prison from which the soul may eventually escape (Phaedrus
250c). The determining factor in whether the soul must continue the
cycle of rebirth or be liberated from the physical is the extent to
which the soul, while still embodied, has managed to free itself from
bodily concerns (Phaedo 82b-c). The divided line (Republic
509b-511e) and the allegory of the cave (Republic 514a-517e)
present in summary and picturesque form this vision of the soul in its
quest to escape the realm of physical existence.
What is striking about Diotima’s views
on immortality, personal identity, and eros is the extent to
which they diverge from standard Platonism.
Where Platonism holds immortality as the ontological condition of the
soul, Diotima understands immortality as an achievement. Where Platonism
sees immortality in terms that stress a personal identity preceding
birth and following death, Diotima sees immortality in terms that stress
the transience of personal identity and the transcendence of mortality
through the lives of our descendants. In simplest terms, Diotima’s two
claims that (a) we never desire what we already possess and that (b) we
desire immortality, entail that we are not immortal. This contradicts
the Platonic doctrine that we already possess immortality. Put another
way, for one who follows standard Platonism, the concern is the destiny
of one’s soul; for one who follows Diotima, the concern is whether one’s
soul will have a destiny in the memory of others.
The
contrast between standard Platonism and Diotima is also evident in their
respective doctrines of eros and its relation to reason. In the
Republic, Socrates says that the soul is tripartite, composed of
reason, spirit, and appetite (Republic 441a). The activity of
reason in harnessing the spirit and the appetites is the key to freeing
oneself from the carnal prison. Eros belongs to the appetitive
part of the soul (Republic 439d). The character of Socrates
speaks elsewhere of “the madness inspired by love” (Phaedrus
253c) and of “the flood of passion that pours in upon the lover” (Phaedrus
255c), emphasizing the inherent need that reason serve as its
taskmaster. This echoes the traditional mythical account of the
blindfolded Eros. There is nothing in Diotima’s speech to suggest that
eros needs taming by reason to pursue its proper object. The goal
of creating forms of beauty comes naturally to it. The birthing metaphor
is significant as it suggests that the natural course of eros is
what I have called the Will-to-Express. By its nature eros is the
attraction to what is beautiful.
The
contrast between standard Platonism and Diotima seems to diminish
considerably when she speaks of a person using beautiful things “like
rising stairs” (211c) to ascend to “the Beautiful itself, absolute,
pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great
nonsense of mortality . . . the divine Beauty itself in its one form”
(211d-e). Although the word “Idea” does not occur in the Symposium,
the typical standard Platonist imagery is unmistakable. As R. M. Dancy
notes, Diotima is here using the “standard language of the theory of
forms” (Dancy, 166). A cursory reading of the passage on the divided
line in the Republic (509b-511e) bears this out.
The
fact that Diotima’s language mimics the standard Platonic way of
speaking about the Forms should not prevent one from seeing that she
puts the theory to use in such a way that the usual themes are curiously
absent. For Diotima, the role of the absolute form of Beauty is that a
person, once having had a vision of Beauty itself, is empowered “to give
birth not to images of virtue . . . but to true virtue” (212a). We meet
once again the birthing metaphor, combined interestingly with the
divided line’s distinction between image and reality. For Diotima, the
lover’s goal is not simply to perceive the form of Beauty itself.
Rather, the perception of absolute Beauty is the means to the end of
creating true virtue. In Phaedo (68a-b) Plato portrays
philosophers as those who spend their lives in preparation for an
afterlife in which they attain final wisdom. In other words, the reward
of the virtuous life is the contemplation of the Forms. Diotima’s speech
gives not the slightest hint that she is interested in the afterlife.
For her, the contemplation of the Form of Beauty, here and now, is
possible and is the necessary condition for creating true virtue.
Diotima’s this-worldly perspective
serves as a corrective to standard Platonism’s tendency to think of the
sensible (visible) world as a mere image of the intelligible world of
the Forms and to think of the body as a prison from which one must
eventually escape. Her view also calls into question Nygren’s claim that
eros is essentially other-worldly. Diotima preserves the
non-relative ontological status of the Forms (specifically, of Beauty
and Goodness) but her philosophy does not send the soul on an
other-worldly journey to join with them. On the contrary, her concept of
personal identity puts any hope of literal survival of death in
jeopardy. For Diotima, this is no tragedy. The mortality of physical
existence is overcome in other ways—not by survival but by procreation,
by giving “birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul.”
Diotima and
Process Metaphysics
Plato’s
critical distance from standard Platonism is evident in Diotima’s
speech. What is less evident is that he achieved in this speech his
closest approximation, within the scope of a single sustained line of
argument, to contemporary versions of process metaphysics, especially as
Whitehead and Hartshorne developed it. First, like Diotima, their
philosophy is this-worldly. While some process philosophers have argued
for hope in personal consciousness beyond death, Whitehead and
Hartshorne were content to speak of objective immortality in the memory
of God.
Diotima construes immortality solely as being remembered by others,
although she does not extend this to deity. Second, Whitehead and
Hartshorne follow Diotima in denying an unchanging self, whether
physical or psychological, that persists through time. Finally,
Diotima’s concept of eros as an impulse to create forms of beauty
that one will not live to enjoy, has its analogue in process thought.
Whitehead speaks of the initial aim of each moment of our
experience, which is the ideal, inherited from God, of what it can
become, including its value for others. The value of one’s experiences
for subsequent occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls the
superjective character of actual entities (cf. Whitehead 1978, 87).
In the
brief span of Diotima’s discourse, Plato does not develop the full
ramifications of the metaphysics he is suggesting or answer the
objections that might be posed to it. Hartshorne, for example,
characterizes the process view of personal identity in these terms:
“temporal designations belong with the subject not the predicate. It is
not that John has the predicate sick-now, but that John-now has the
predicate sick” (1972, 214). But on this view, what is the explanation
for John’s own sense of being a continuous self, of being sick now and
well later? Whitehead and
Hartshorne replace the idea of a substance undergoing changes with the
idea of a cumulative succession of momentary experiences. Each
experience appropriates elements of feeling and thought from its
predecessors and, upon completion, serves as a datum for subsequent
experiences. The measure of John’s sense of continuity with his past is
the extent to which his present experience inherits elements of feeling
and thought from his immediate environment, which is the central nervous
system supporting this train of experiences.
His present experience also has the superjective character of
being a factor in subsequent occasions of experience. William James was
fully within the tradition of process thinking when he wrote, “Each
Thought is thus born as owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it
realized as its Self to its own later proprietor” (1950 v. I, 339;
chapter 10).
Diotima’s metaphysic of personal identity squares neatly with her denial
of a merely self-interest theory of motivation; as I have argued,
eros, as she characterizes it, is a will-to-express rather than a
will-to-possess. We have seen that she finds examples of the erotic
impulse even in the animal kingdom when an animal lays down its life for
its young. These too are themes in process thought. Hartshorne notes
that there is no evidence from biology that self-interest is the primary
motivation in nonhuman animals (1997, 189). Indeed, self-interest and
altruism are more like a continuum than definitely identifiable motives
in the animal kingdom.
It would be a biological anomaly if one did not find this same continuum
of motivation in human beings. One’s very existence requires the
physical joining of sperm and egg from two individuals; one’s initial
physical development requires the environment of the womb; and in later
stages of psychological development, one’s sense of personal identity is
inseparable from social influence. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one
is not born, but rather becomes, an individual.
In
Diotima’s philosophy, eros is linked to beauty as the lover is
directed to the beloved. More precisely, love is less a desire to
possess the beautiful than to create it, hence Diotima’s fondness for
the metaphor of procreation (206e). The lover achieves immortality by
creating various forms of beauty that transcend their creator. She
leaves unresolved, however, the problem of love’s failures and
distortions. She does say that the ignorant do not desire beauty or
goodness because they do not know that they lack it (204a). It is
possible that she is being ironic, for this claim is at odds with the
view that she expresses a few lines later in the dialogue that nonhuman
animals exhibit eros (207b). Nonhuman animals are at least as
ignorant as the ignorant human ones. Moreover, even an ignorant person
can seek to have children, a characteristic that Diotima places at the
lower most rung of the ladder of love—procreation of the body rather
than of the spirit (208e).
It is
remarkable that Diotima does not mention the fact that individuals are,
if not immortalized at least remembered, for a number of reasons, not
all of them admirable. Commenting on this oversight, Whitehead says:
The word Eros means ‘Love’, and in The
Symposium Plato gradually elicits his final conception of the urge
towards ideal perfection. It is obvious that he should have written a
companion dialogue which might have been named The Furies, dwelling on
the horrors lurking within imperfect realization (1933, 189).
Plato has resources
for addressing this problem while remaining true to the spirit of
process thought. We noted that Diotima recognizes higher and lower forms
of eros, which suggests varying levels of understanding of beauty
and goodness. This idea can be combined with the idea put forward in the
Sophist that “real being” is the power to act or to be acted upon
(247e). If “or” is changed to “and”—making the formula: “real being is
the power to act and to be acted upon”—and if “real being” refers to
momentary actualities, then one has a precise Platonic version of
Whitehead’s concept of an actual entity. Multiple real beings (actual
entities), striving to create forms of beauty, with varying degrees of
appreciation for it, are a recipe for conflict. To be sure, the
existence of multiple real beings also opens the possibility of creating
forms of beauty that no single individual could accomplish, as in
cooperative endeavors. But multiple creativity guarantees a mixture of
disharmony and harmony.
The
existence of many real beings pursuing their own goals raises the
problem of cosmic order. Plato calls soul that which is
self-moved and not merely moved by another (Laws 10, 896-897). A.
E. Taylor suggests that the word for “motion” (kinesis) can be
translated “process,” which can include both physical and psychological
processes (Plato 1934, lii). Suppose there are many real beings in the
sense expressed in Sophist and that each one is or has a soul, in
the sense of being self-moved. If the cosmos itself is composed only of
these entities, how can there be order on a cosmic scale? How can
an uncoordinated set of centers of creative activity add up to a single
ordered whole? Localized order or order within the cosmos can be
explained by localized activity of entities within the cosmos.
The order of the cosmos, however, cannot be the outcome of a
coordinated effort by the many entities since their very existence,
severally scattered throughout the cosmos, presupposes the cosmos as a
field of activity. If there is a cosmic ordering power that itself falls
under the metaphysical principle of self-motion, cosmic order can be
explained. Moreover, the explanation is not ad hoc since all
real beings, localized ones and the cosmic ordering power, fall under
the principle of self-motion. The cosmic ordering power is not, in
Whitehead’s words, an exception to metaphysical principles, invoked to
save their collapse, but is their chief exemplification (1978, 343).
Plato never gives the argument that I
have just outlined, but I believe, following Hartshorne, that it is a
reasonable application of principles he expresses in the Laws and
in the Sophist (Hartshorne 1983, 35-36).
If Plato could accept the argument, there would still be the question of
the Demiurge and the World-Soul mentioned in Timaeus,
Statesman, Philebus, Laws, and Epinomis.
Hartshorne maintains, following Cornford, “The Demiurge is the
world soul as ordering the world in light of the eternal ideal” (1983,
37). To complete the theory of the World Soul as deity, it is necessary
to conceive the eternal ideals, the Forms, as intradeical—in
Dombrowski’s apt expression—that is to say, the divine intellect. A
consequence of this revised Platonic theism is that some forms of order
and disorder within the world cannot be divinely imposed. God can
guarantee a cosmic order, but because there exist a plurality of
real beings that act—and are not simply acted upon—not everything that
happens can be chosen by deity. The conflict of decisions among the
creatures, and between the creatures and God, are possible, opening the
way to tragedies that not even God can avoid. As already noted, multiple
creativity guarantees both harmony and disharmony, and the logic of the
matter does not change if one of the creative agents is divine.
This construction of a type of theism
based on principles of Plato’s later philosophy is obviously not found
in the Symposium. There are reasons, moreover, why Diotima does
not develop it. We noted that she does not question premise 4 of the
argument that the gods are already in possession of the beautiful. By
Diotima’s principles, because the gods possess the beautiful they cannot
love it. She marks the contrast between the non-divine and the divine in
these terms: the mortal creatures, unlike the divine, cannot be the same
throughout eternity (208a). This echoes the argument of the Republic
(book 2, 380e-381c) that perfection implies immutability in all
respects. It follows that eros is not a god. It fell largely to
process philosophers and theologians of the twentieth century to press
the case against the concept of perfection as immutable and for the
concept of perfect forms of mutability.
For example, Hartshorne argues that it is no more meaningful to speak of
a greatest possible beauty than it is to speak of a greatest possible
positive integer (1970, 262). In Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory, beauty
is the mean between the double extremes of order and disorder and
complexity and simplicity (see especially Dombrowski 2004, chapter 2).
As there is no absolute or fixed meaning to either contrast—order vs.
disorder and complexity vs. simplicity—so there is no immutable standard
of beauty. This does not entail that there can be no comparative value
judgments concerning beauty; as one can speak of greater and lesser
numbers, so analogously it may be possible to say one thing is more
beautiful than another. This possibility cannot be dismissed simply on
the basis of Plato’s argument from the Republic.
Diotima characterizes eros as
giving birth to beauty in both body and soul. If there is no such thing
as the possession of absolute beauty (because such a thing is
impossible), then the way is clear to conceive God as the highest form
of eros, striving to create ever richer and profound forms of
beauty. This includes the creation of beauty even in the face of life’s
worst tragedies, for as we have seen, tragedy must be real for any deity
presiding over a cosmos of lesser creators. In Hartshorne’s words:
It is through love that tragedy is, not
indeed wholly prevented, but made bearable and given whatever beauty it
is capable of. The love that can do this is that which expects to share
with others the sufferings from which no actuality, human or
superhuman—subject as all must be to chance and incompatibility—can
entirely escape. Such love is not, as Plato thought, the search for the
supreme beauty. In its highest human and superhuman forms it simply is
that beauty (1953, 108).
At any moment, on
this view, there exists a beauty of the cosmos as a whole, dimly
appreciated by the creatures within it, and wholly appreciated by God
who wove it from the many strands of activity in real beings. If God is
forever making use of creaturely decisions—which decisions are not
divinely made—cosmic beauty would have to be a constantly shifting
mosaic that never achieves static completion. God, ever active according
to this theology, can be called “the most, and best, moved mover”
(Hartshorne 1997, 6, 39; cf. Viney 2006).
On the view I am urging, the deity is
not immutable, but it is indeed immortal. Using Diotima’s principle that
one cannot desire what one possesses, one must say that God does not
desire immortality. I have also argued in effect that there are infinite
forms of beauty that God, being immortal, can endlessly strive to
create. Any form of beauty that comes to be is destined to be
appreciated by God. If God, and no creature, is everlastingly the
beneficiary of every good and beautiful creation, does it follow that
divine eros is, after all, acquisitive, a Will-to-Possess, to
revert to Nygren’s phrases? I do not think so. The negative connotation
of “acquisitive” stems from the idea that one looks to one’s own
interests at the expense of the interests of others. On the process
model I am proposing, creation and enjoyment of beauty or goodness does
not occur at the expense of any particular real being within the cosmos.
Both the weal and the woe of the creatures are shared by God. God may be
the one real being for whom interest in others and self-interest
perfectly coincide (Hartshorne 1984, 119-121).
I have not argued that eros
exhausts the meanings of “love” as it may apply to God or the creatures.
For example, Thomas Oord defines “love” as “acting intentionally, in
sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall
well-being” (2004, 9, 31, 59, 75). I see no reason why God,
characterized by eros as Diotima conceives it, cannot be loving,
and necessarily so, in Oord’s sense. The only meanings of love that I
foresee being incompatible with the view I propose are those—such as
Aquinas and Nygren defend—that deny to perfect love all passivity or
passibility. I will simply state my opinion that those interpretations
of love, especially as attempts to spell out the meaning of agape
as the word is used throughout the Septuagint and the New Testament, are
deeply flawed.
I have defended the claim that Diotima denies, that there is a divine
eros. But I have shown how the concept of a divine eros can
be expressed with principles from Plato’s later work, making Plato’s
thought converge with process philosophy. Those who love, says Diotima,
are poets in the original sense of the word (i.e. makers) calling into
existence varieties of beauty that were not there before (205c). Well
then did Whitehead speak of God as “the poet of the world, with tender
patience leading it by [the divine] vision of truth, beauty, and
goodness” (1978, 346).
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