Eros and Plato

And as David K. O’Connor shows us in this inspiring and brilliantly argued book, the ancient and modern worlds both know enough about love to recognize that it, like C. S. Lewis’s lion Aslan, is neither safe nor tame but certainly good. This recognition, however, leads us to flee from or attempt to contain its dangers. We shy from accepting Eros as a strange god who invites us to be drawn out of ourselves, to enter into a sacred mystery in response to which we may be transformed. Like the ancient Athenian general Alcibiades, we fear that, for all our native abilities, we may fail the challenge. Better to pretend that the mystery is an illusion and the challenge no more than wishful thinking.

The problem is that Eros will not just go away; if we lock him out at the door, he will fly in through the window. O’Connor’s aim is to “unsettle” our thinking about love only because our thinking is so often hilariously inadequate to our living. We “perform a comedy when we avoid love even as we pursue it,” he writes, and “we create a tragedy when we reject love and destroy it even while we demand it.”

Like Socrates, O’Connor wants to force us to see what we have willfully overlooked, and he challenges us to embrace the fullness of love, in its comic and tragic scope, because it is a kind of “barefoot philosophy.” That is, if we come to recognize the truth about love, we will not become trained aficionados of an arcane discipline. Rather, we will discover the truth about ourselves and live, perhaps, more dangerously and, without question, more fully.

Most readers do not keep books of philosophy on their shelves. I think they will want this one, however. O’Connor’s argument is not a new one, but an ancient one made sinuously responsive to modern culture. So, also, is his mode of argument ancient. Like his acknowledged master, Plato, he proceeds by way of myth and storytelling, by a kind of conversational reflection and inquiry that invites us to wander with him, to be puzzled, and to marvel at what is most startling about what we thought we already knew.

Plato’s Bedroom, at one level, consists of O’Connor’s patient and exciting retelling of the stories in Plato’s two great dialogues on love, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. He gives us a seat in Agathon’s house, as the noble Athenians offer their inadvertently revealing speeches on the nature of love. He lets us walk with Socrates and Phaedrus out in the countryside as they read their own speeches on what it means to fall in love. At each turn in these dialogues, O’Connor highlights a problem that any would-be lover must someday confront and then explores it through works of modern art and literature.

We already know that love has depths our “medicalized vocabulary” about it cannot express, but we do not always recognize how its complex roots interweave with everything in our lives. In the first chapter, O’Connor leads us into the worlds of Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica and Andre Dubus’s short story “Falling in Love” to remind us how various, gnawing, and frightening love can be. We think it is a simple matter of lust—until the moment, like a potion, love transforms our lives into something wilder, stranger, and more true.

In his subsequent chapters, O’Connor reflects on the various tricks human beings have of trying to reduce, or even to kill, love. Like the early speakers in the Symposium, we may try to pretend that love is simple and subject to our control precisely because we are afraid that love reveals how badly we all need to be needed (illustrated here with Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters). Like Lysias in the Phaedrus, we may conclude that it is something so violent and unruly that we are better off killing it. That is just what Othello does to Desdemona, as O’Connor convincingly shows: He kills his beloved not so much because he is jealous of her infidelities but because he is jealous of his own individual freedom.

But love comes back. We cannot forever resist the emptiness in ourselves that demands to be filled by another. We want to be made whole. What, we ask, will do that? The one we love? Yes. But that will not suffice. Plato’s Agathon claims that love is an “overflowing fullness of the human heart.” The desire not only to cleave to another but to “give birth in beauty” to new life, to new ideas and new works, is no mere ornament to love but of its very essence. So much we already know, writes O’Connor, not only because we have read Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew but because we sense that the whole excitement of love comes from its “openness to the sacred.” We feel that the meaning of our lives grows out of it.

To fall in love, and to be loved, is not simply to be made whole, as if one were then complete and content. We do not want to be content. We want to be good. In Socrates’ great speech in the Symposium, he teaches us that love entails becoming better than we are, remolding ourselves so that we may be worthy of the absolute dimensions of reality. But this leads us to a confrontation with just that aspect of love we may have been most tempted to avoid: We may fail to live up to the image of ourselves that the one who loves us proposes.

So may we also fail to account for the fullness of those dimensions, leaving behind the particular beauty of this peculiar person who loves us for what Socrates calls the “great sea” of Beauty Itself.

O’Connor is a master storyteller who, like Plato, is at his best when retelling and revealing the depths of others’ stories. His manner of weaving ancient and modern thought together alone suffices to make us lonely, “medicalized” moderns feel part of a greater drama. And his warm, disarming style will seduce even the most cynical reader into undertaking the long walk toward wisdom with snub-nosed, barefoot Socrates.

James Matthew Wilson teaches at Villanova. His latest book is The Fortunes of Poetry.