Love, reason and transcendence : ‘Ineffable’ love and the limits of sense

Abstract

Love is one of the greatest phenomena if not the greatest. Thus, in my MA thesis, I am investigating the concept of Love in its connections to transcendence, to the divine in contrast to the limits of “sense” both as the empirical world and linguistic expression. Through the comparative close reading of Plato’s Symposium in connection with Phaedrus and Phaedo, and İlham Dilman’s Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Paradoxes, I am arguing for a normative understanding of Love. Particularly I am focusing on the account of Love (Greek erôs) as in between human and divine, mortal and immortal, as an ascent from bodily love to the Form of Beauty. Within this framework, I am claiming that the ethical is the foundation of love as a transcendence which is an “ineffable” personal inner experience, and that Socrates, as the main character of the Socratic dialogues, is a fictitious character and the main argument of Plato’s account of Love as in between Reason and Transcendence, in person. He [Socrates] serves the purpose of illustrating, via personification, the embodiment of taking ‘no particular standpoint’ but instead being in an active and dynamic state of inquiry, operating within various dialogues as contexts. I am arguing that this is to reveal the ethical dimensions of the particular way of life Plato finds as worth living, that is a philosophical life.