I have recently been reading a bunch of texts in the Platonistic tradition of Iris Murdoch. That is, I’ve been reading Murdoch herself and Sophie Grace Chappell, mainly, and have found their ethical views (particularly Chappell’s elucidations in Knowing What To Do (2014)) extremely interesting and insightful.
One of the great points Murdoch makes in The Sovereignty of Good (1970)1 is that of the usefulness of the metaphor of vision in ethics. She borrows this, of course, from Plato and Simon Weil,2 the former with his important discussion of the Good providing vision of the Forms in the Republic; the latter with his prioritisation of attention as an ethical necessity.
Since I started reading Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) this weekend, I was moved by the intense discussion of love and art in the first chapter. Murdoch says:
The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind, may be conveyed early on in childhood. ‘Look, listen, isn’t that pretty, isn’t that nice?’ Also, ‘Don’t touch!’
She ties this to a central concept in contemplation, that of respect. This concept’s centrality to contemplation, and therefore to love, has far-reaching consequences for my reading of other Platonistic texts on erotics and aesthetics.
The idea that, as the Kantians would have it, what we love in each person is their rational principle, is handily discarded by Chappell, when she says in Knowing What To Do:
Surely what I love romantically in him is him, not ‘rational nature as such’ in him. Nor again, apparently, is ‘rational nature as such’ what I love in someone if I am one year old, and he is my father; nor again if he is one year old and I am his father.
In fact, this is not a description of love as much as a description of what she calls benevolence, which is at once more readily universal, and has less to do with the characters of the particular people involved; if I feel benevolence towards someone, I do not care whether I am the one to make them happy, only that they do become happy, whereas with one I truly love, I would be much gladder to have been involved in making happy.
To finally get to the point, Murdoch makes mention of a brilliant section of Plato’s Phaedrus (252D):
Each chooses his love among the beautiful according to his character, and considers him to be a God in his own eyes, and makes him out to be like a statue and adorns it, like one who will honour [a God] or celebrate the mysteries.3
In my view, this brilliant passage — one of the most brilliant in Plato — had always been a description of what might unflatteringly be called infatuation, but upon reconsideration in the light of Weil, Murdoch, and Chappell’s excellent discussions of attention, I no longer think this is the necessary reading. In fact, I might be inclined to say that infatuation as opposed to love is like loving bad art, which Murdoch discusses at length: when we love bad art, it brings us away from realities and, rather than allow us to forget ourselves in favour of another, inflates our sense of self. Chappell puts it very simply:
If we insist on the crude clear question ‘What’s the use of contemplation?’, and won’t accept the real answer, that it is valuable in its own right, still a crude clear instrumental answer is available. To put it one way, contemplation is good for us because it builds in us the ability to concentrate, a crucial prerequisite for all sorts of other ends. To put it another and slightly different way, contemplation is good because it focuses us, and focuses us on something outside ourselves.4
This is precisely the opposite of infatuation, just as it is the opposite of viewing bad art.5 An infatuated person is obsessed with a fantastical image of their beloved, and refuses to see them as they really are.6 Infatuation, here, becomes a masturbatory practice, which ignores the other, and allows only for the elation of the self.
It should be noted here that, just as with Plato’s lover and beloved, I am not necessarily speaking of a sexual or romantic love, but of a kind of relationship between the self and the other. We can see infatuation, rather than love, in parents who, for example, see their children as extensions of themselves and become intensely upset when their children show themselves to be independent people, for example by coming out as queer.7 Similarly, I have had experience with men who would put me on a pedestal whenever I afforded them polite responses, but when I made my discomfort or disinterest clear, became verbally abusive and cruel; the fantastical idol of me that they had erected in their minds was shattered, and they lashed out in anger and, perhaps, a sort of confusion.
Is this not what Plato describes? Not necessarily. In the above section of the Phaedrus, Plato is discussing precisely seeing the characteristics that one finds desirable in one’s beloved. It is important, here, that the lover chooses his love according to his character (πρὸς τρόπου), and here we must imagine that he first must have attained some knowledge of his character in order to make such a decision. He must see his beloved for who he is, insofar as it is possible, and love him as a God precisely because of his character.8
- Although I’ve mainly been reading the original, I also found the Norwegian translation by Kjetil Røed (2025) supremely useful, particularly for Elin Svenneby’s brilliant introduction. ↩︎
- Though I cannot ask Weil about his preferred name and pronouns, it seems clear to me that there is substantial proof that he was transmasculine, including his use of masculine pronouns and name in certain contexts. I freely admit to basing this mainly on statements made in introductions to his works and not proper biographies, but I would rather call one historical figure too many trans than one too many cis; the cis have enough heroes already. ↩︎
- “Τόν τε οὖν Ἔρωτα τῶν καλῶν πρὸς τρόπου ἐκλέγεται ἕκαστος, καὶ ὡς θεὸν αὐτὸν ἐκεῖνον ὄντα ἑαυτῷ οἷον ἄγαλμα τεκταίνεταί τε καὶ κατακοσμεῖ, ὡς τιμήσων τε καὶ ὀργιάσων.” ↩︎
- Knowing What To Do (2017), 304-5. ↩︎
- I think I would venture away from what I believe Murdoch’s opinion to be, that there is such a thing as bad art in itself, and hold with Chappell, who says that anything could conceivably be an object of contemplation. We might then say that art is good insofar as it makes itself accessible to the process of contemplation, or that it is good when it is being contemplated. ↩︎
- Insofar as it is possible, which, Murdoch reminds us, is never fully. ↩︎
- My great thanks to my friend Clio for both noting this and providing me with the example. ↩︎
- Indeed, it is from the Leader-Gods that we have both our own characters and the characters we desire. To quote Proclus: “What I saw in the children had been said of the parents.” “Ὅσσ’ ἴδον ἐν τεκέεσσιν, ἐφημίξαντο τοκεῦσιν.” Though the use of φημίζειν is odd, we must surely read something like this in the context Olympiodorus uses it. ↩︎
Conjectanea 