Diotima attributes several characteristics to love, including the desire to be attached to that which is good and the desire for that attachment to be an eternal one. She continues by saying that human beings naturally want immortality so that they can be attached to the good forever. This leads to the idea of immortality by generation, and pregnancy through both body and mind. Using these, men come as close as they can to immortality. In the case of Hesiod and Homer, this immortality comes from "pregnancy of mind," as they created poetry that carried their names into history. The next (and more perplexing claim) that Diotima makes is that this same pregnancy of mind led Achilles to risk his life for Petroclus; as she puts it, he would not have risked his life for his lover if that same action would not have given him an eternal, heroic name.
This led me to an interesting question: can this same drive for immortality occur outside of Love? I think it can (as many media-based bad guys have shown), but I'm wondering what the explanation would be from Diotima's standpoint. Why do I ask? Consider some of history's bad guys: Vlad the Impaler, Attila the Hun, Marquis de Sade, Elizabeth Bathory. They all have two things in common; each of them attempted immortality (from Diotima's description) in one form or another, and each of them did horrible things to attain this goal. It seems that, in these instances, these individuals are seeking an eternal attachment something....in this case, though, the "something" is not the good. So, because it is not oriented toward the good, then this kind of striving for immortality isn't based in love, despite having many of the same characteristics. My question is this: what are bad guys striving for? If heroic fame grounded in love is what motivated Achilles, then what is infamy grounded in and how does it motivate the actions of men in a similar manner to love?
This is a good question. I'm glad we got to it a bit in class Tuesday. We'll return to it again.
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