What did Socrates love?

Tomáš Hejduk

pp. 56-71

in: Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, Kamila Pacovská (eds), Love and its objects, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

At the very beginning of the history of philosophy we find Socrates saying that the only thing he really knows is love.¹ Nevertheless, scholars remain unclear about exactly what knowledge of love Socrates was claiming to possess. This chapter draws upon the Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus to identify the object of Socrates's love and the rationale for his endorsement of a curiously modified traditional pederasty.² The first section shows that the object of Socrates's love cannot be identified with the objects of various desires instantiated in the individual parts of the soul. The second section demonstrates that Socrates loves the other as a divine being and that his love involves both "need love" and "bestowal love." The final section attempts to show that, in the strongest sense of Socrates's erôs, the true object of his love is love itself.

Cited authors

Socrates