Re: everything is about Eros

Thanks for the interesting reply. Just on the point that "the notion that the Wille zur Macht is easily compatible with a liberal or genially left-wing atheism seems unlikely to me" - I agree, but then, like yourself no doubt, I don't swallow Nietzsche whole, but chew over the chunks that I find most digestible. (I quite like what Alphonso Lingis has made of Nietzsche in his paper 'Black Stars: the Pedigree of the Evaluators'. I might quote a bit of it if I can dig out my copy somewhere. ... something about the philosophical significance of the throbbing erect penis of a Thai youth at eye level or something.) On the question of Beauty Itself, and referring to the Symposium, I've always had a problem with Plato's doctrine. I am relying on my fallible memory here, but you'll recall how he says that the lover of boys will use boys as a step on the ladder to loving beautiful constitutions, beautiful mathematical proofs, etc, until finally he catches a glimpse of Beauty Itself. Now it's this last step that I've always had a problem with. I understand what it is to perceive the beauty of a comely lad; I understand what it is to perceive the beauty of mathematical proofs (Cantor's famous 'diagonal' proof that the number of real numbers between zero and unity is greater than the number of integers - though both are infinite - has always struck me as rather fine); but I have no idea what an experience of Beauty Itself (as opposed to beautiful subjects such as boys or mathematical theorems) is supposed to mean. I'm quite sure that I've never had such an experience. You see, I like real flesh-and-blood boys, and cannot view them as merely stepping stones to the supposedly superior love of metaphysical abstractions. (Ralph Chubb: 'There is no God in the Universe; all is accident or fate. My divinity is an eternal smiling Boy, who says "In Me all is harmony & genial life."' Male Intergenerational Intimacy, Sandfort, Brongersma & Naerssen, p. 121) I can only assume that by Beauty Itself Plato means to draw attention to some sort of private mystical experience to which he (mistakenly, in my opinion) ascribes cognitive significance. It also seems to me that Plato, in order to give this putative experience of Beauty Itself some kind of content, succumbed in these middle dialogues to the doctrine of self-predication, that Felinity is itself perfectly feline, Beauty is itself supremely beautiful, etc., which I am quite sure leads to a sea of nonsense - as Plato I think himself realised in the later dialogues from the Parmenides onwards. But all this is no doubt the result of my being corrupted by reading the likes of Moore, Russell and Ayer. Ah, my misspent youth!