“The Symposium” in Light of Hegel
The structure of being looks a lot like the structure of desire.
Revisiting “The Symposium” in light of Hegel: The aim of desire, according to Plato, is not to merge with or disappear into the object (Aristophanes’ account), but sustain its object—to sustain contemplative access to its object, and ultimately to sustain desire. To sustain the object is to reproduce it in some way. In the earthly and sexual domain, this happens by way of children. In ordinary cave-knowledge, this involves representation. What happens at the level of the contemplation of the forms?
Plato’s idea is that the love of the form of the beauty gives birth to virtue. What this means is that the effect of beauty is to sustain something in us. Here, desire creates psychical structure: not just transient structures associated with temporary acts of knowing, but virtues—persistent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways (compare the development of superego structure in relation to the psychoanalytic object).
The reproduce-not-merge insight is just to say that to that the proper aim of desire is to internalize difference without abolishing it. Hegel’s insight in this respect is that this is just another way of saying “self-consciousness” (the existence of which is predicated on a reciprocal, non-overpowering relation between self-consciousnesses). And self-consciousness turns out to be another way of saying “the world.” The evidence for this is that however much we might embrace epistemological skepticism, a dialectical examination of candidates for the basic unit of being (“The Absolute”) reveals the only thing that will do is not something thing-like, but something formal, and not a part of being but in some sense the whole thing.
This formal candidate turns out to be suspiciously similar in structure to mental structure (including Kant’s categories): we can’t divorce the concept of being-an-entity from that of a relation-to-otherness, and ultimately from the concepts of force, law, causality, and so on. On reflection, these structures converge with the concepts of self-consciousness and desire.
This should be a motivation not to return to the idea that objects-as-appearances are products of our minds, but to try out the idea that subjects and objects are two manifestations of an underlying reality that is structured like self-consciousness, which is to say structured like desire (“for the sake of persistence, please don’t master or merge with me – let’s revolve around each other in a nice mutual-admiration orbit, or sufficiently balance the forces of attraction and repulsion, or sameness and otherness”).
Should we be surprised? Kantian cognitive categories are cribbed from what Aristotle thought he got by paying attention to being, after all. And returning to this from the epistemological side: at the level of knowing, there are important cognitive persistence conditions, which is to say cognitive reproductive capacities. Kant, in fact, is at bottom concerned with the reproductive grounds for the possibility of experience. To structure the manifold (spatially, temporally, causally, logically), to synthesize it, requires holding on to one piece of it even as we move on to another. Establishing a relation requires that the old be preserved alongside the new (consider the phenomenological horizon to an object as we shift our attention between its parts: something must be reproduced at the periphery of attention in order make what is attended to meaningful). But if I’m doing this, a being is doing it; and if a being is doing it, certainly there’s no reason to think that being isn’t doing it, that the world isn’t doing it—all on its own, no assistance from individual subjects required.
Thanks Wes, this is a really interesting piece. I read it while reading Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, and I think there are some engaging parallels there. In Murdoch, who is thoroughly Platonic, art and eros are both seen as a form of attention that sustains the object. They represent the Other to the Self in a way that maintains a necessary tension while also resolving certain moral problems about the relationship between self and other. Eros is virtue, in that it doesn't seek to consume its object but rather seeks to see it clearly, as separate and yet still part of the self.
The main character in the novel idealises his beloved into state of perfection (and therefore impossibility), but his problem is that his representation is ultimately self-directed and egoistic.
The unifying drive may be eros or art (as Murdoch has it) or agape (as Hubert Dreyfus has it), but it all seems like desire, or a sustaining attention of the self towards the other. The way that, as you put it, 'being-an-entity' is wedded to 'relation-to-otherness' seems to be of fundamental importance here.
Wow! What a great read. Granted it took me four attempts but I think I get what you’re saying. But hey, I think four attempts isn’t too bad considering my only philosophical background is listening to you guys on PEL.
The idea that desire is something that we need to sustain both the object we desire but also ourselves is fascinating to me.
I’m really excited that you are starting a Substack. I always love your insight on PEL so it will be great to get more of that in this forum.