it is by now not absurd to see Burne-Jones and William Blake as the two ends of the same resistance to the Satanic Mills of Albion

Rage against the machine 
review by BRIAN LYNCH 
IRISH TIMES 


BIOGRAPHY: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, By Fiona MacCarthy, Faber, 656pp. £25 excerpt:

Ned liked to represent himself, in MacCarthy’s phrase, as a pitiable object. But he had what Turgenev said the poet Belinsky possessed, “the timid sternness peculiar to nervous people”, and in his soul there was, in the words of his nephew, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “iron and granite”. The man to whom Burne-Jones deferred all his life, William Morris, was undoubtedly a greater genius as a personality, and yet, perhaps because of his superiority as a draughtsman (in itself a gift that, for proper use, requires moral strength), Burne-Jones did not succumb to Morris’s socialism – when he was offered a knighthood he took it, but only, he said apologetically, for his son’s sake. The hereditary part of a peerage, he hardly needed to say, is pretty much its whole point.

Another way of getting away from the red revolutions of politics and sex was humour, an avoidance technique Burne-Jones used from an early age. Any time his nanny – he was wary of her “potentially overwhelming fondness” – asked what he was thinking he always had the same answer: “Camels”. This constant jokiness is very English: Ned, after all, is a character in The Goon Show, and an avatar of Prince Charles. But Irish humour, in the portly person of Oscar Wilde, also appealed to Burne-Jones. At the artist’s first and only one-man show, the playwright wore a bronze-red coat, the back of which was cut in the shape of a cello. As Wilde’s commerce with prostitutes was revealed, Burne-Jones referred to him as “that horrible creature” and lamented that “he hadn’t had the common courage to shoot himself”. But, as MacCarthy intelligently points out, what upset the sexually tolerant artist was “his perception that Wilde had betrayed the cause of beauty . . . a heinous crime”. In any event Ned relented: before Oscar was released from prison he said, “I should shake hands or bow to him if I saw him.”

it is by now not absurd to see Burne-Jones and William Blake as the two ends of the same resistance to the Satanic Mills of Albion

Rage against the machine 
review by BRIAN LYNCH 
IRISH TIMES 


BIOGRAPHY: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, By Fiona MacCarthy, Faber, 656pp. £25 excerpt:

Ned liked to represent himself, in MacCarthy’s phrase, as a pitiable object. But he had what Turgenev said the poet Belinsky possessed, “the timid sternness peculiar to nervous people”, and in his soul there was, in the words of his nephew, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “iron and granite”. The man to whom Burne-Jones deferred all his life, William Morris, was undoubtedly a greater genius as a personality, and yet, perhaps because of his superiority as a draughtsman (in itself a gift that, for proper use, requires moral strength), Burne-Jones did not succumb to Morris’s socialism – when he was offered a knighthood he took it, but only, he said apologetically, for his son’s sake. The hereditary part of a peerage, he hardly needed to say, is pretty much its whole point.

Another way of getting away from the red revolutions of politics and sex was humour, an avoidance technique Burne-Jones used from an early age. Any time his nanny – he was wary of her “potentially overwhelming fondness” – asked what he was thinking he always had the same answer: “Camels”. This constant jokiness is very English: Ned, after all, is a character in The Goon Show, and an avatar of Prince Charles. But Irish humour, in the portly person of Oscar Wilde, also appealed to Burne-Jones. At the artist’s first and only one-man show, the playwright wore a bronze-red coat, the back of which was cut in the shape of a cello. As Wilde’s commerce with prostitutes was revealed, Burne-Jones referred to him as “that horrible creature” and lamented that “he hadn’t had the common courage to shoot himself”. But, as MacCarthy intelligently points out, what upset the sexually tolerant artist was “his perception that Wilde had betrayed the cause of beauty . . . a heinous crime”. In any event Ned relented: before Oscar was released from prison he said, “I should shake hands or bow to him if I saw him.”

Sesame and Lilies

"in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end." 

(Talk about projection!)

The complicated Mr. Ruskin: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300092608. His life of aart, history (what haunts here?), architecture (being buildings and people), a philosopher in the old-time sense. I think he could have been an alchemist in things ritualistic and aesthetic, but just couldn't relax enough to really -- well, literally, get it up (see below). But he certainly worked as a catalyst in his time.

And now Effie. I'm stoked. (The cast!) Could be an historical disaster of course (a la Dangerous or was it Desperate Romantics**) , but since Emma is writing it, looks promising.

  ______________

**The PRB's

      not as they were, but as they fill our dreams 

---

And for this dessert (pudding?), this by Lady Eastlake, the real life lady Thompson will play. Everything begins and ends with Jane Eyre, doesn't it?

Sesame and Lilies

"in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end." 

(Talk about projection!)

The complicated Mr. Ruskin: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300092608. His life of aart, history (what haunts here?), architecture (being buildings and people), a philosopher in the old-time sense. I think he could have been an alchemist in things ritualistic and aesthetic, but just couldn't relax enough to really -- well, literally, get it up (see below). But he certainly worked as a catalyst in his time.

And now Effie. I'm stoked. (The cast!) Could be an historical disaster of course (a la Dangerous or was it Desperate Romantics**) , but since Emma is writing it, looks promising.

  ______________

**The PRB's

      not as they were, but as they fill our dreams 

---

And for this dessert (pudding?), this by Lady Eastlake, the real life lady Thompson will play. Everything begins and ends with Jane Eyre, doesn't it?

Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde

go there

Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde

go there

Carl Jung

I've always felt Jung's approach was empirical from the standpoint of a physician. Equilibrium, homeostasis, as in functioning as compensation and complement, as between unconscious and consciousnesses (which holds up well as we're realizing that we actually think in the unconscious and later sort out our arguments -- same for memory; we re-create it. Re-member it) . The key is to consider the psyche as real as any physical thing, just as we accept energy and matter as both "real". The unknown forces at play -- as with physics, the quantum critical mass, etc. -- also part of the exploration.

Empiricism as we apply it concerns making models. Always incomplete, never the thing itself. Think of how code works on the internet now: computers jump ahead, see patterns without models. As with our thinking, I suspect (the processing done in the unconscious), though our awareness(consciousness) functions on the Newtonian level in what we describe as the everyday "common sense" world. Empiricism augments and extrapolates beyond the mere, the sensual. Jung expands our tool kit like a Tardis. :)

Jung, truly a philosopher in the old sense: lover of wisdom, trained in the Muses, a healer and a teacher. This is a good grounding:

Maureen writes:

Dear Lovely & Beloved Deborah & Alice

[...]
Jung looks at the source energy as Pleroma (Seven Sermons to the Dead), Tao (I Ching), unus mundus (alchemy) - all names for a Ground of Being that is unexpainable but can be experienced through intuition, mysticism, creativity, ecstasy and love. Because Eros is gaining the upper hand again through Aquarian holism, Eastern and Western thought have already come together to some extent through the new kind of understanding coming out of quantum physics - the realization of the interrelatedness of all and the archetypal links between psyche, creativity and science.

OF (Jung as 'Old Fool') had no preference for 'logical' over its opposite - the world as infinite and incomprehensible. As a 'whole-some' individual, he embodied the dance of opposites. I love him because he's a guy after my own heart. I was the only bod at my high school and at Uni who leaned toward neither the arts or science, so I embraced both, while everyone else did one or the other. Both are, after all, underpinned by the same archetypal energies and so have always been two sides of the one coin of truth, as wholistic thinkers like Bohm and Pauli understand. Ditto for Jung, a self-proclaimed 'scientist of soul' - and as we all know, soul can't be objectified, weighed, analysed, explained, or in any other way dissected, or pinned like a dead butterfly. Neither can a star, or a leaf, or an atom for that matter. Is a star merely a big ball of flaming gas, or is that simply what it's made of? Jung was not 'scientifically grounded' if by that we mean someone who tries to reduces the poetry and mystery of life to rational, stagnant, objective facts and cerebral explantions.

As OF made clear, at least half of life is irrational! Someone once asked him why the Chinese had developed no 'science'. He replied that this was an optical illusion, since they had a science - the I Ching - grounded in 'general synchronicity' - the understanding that psyche and nature mirror one another meaningfully, as inseparable twin facets of a unitary ground of being. This was the only kind of science that Jung had time for - he didn't buy into the Western hubris of trying to tame and reduce life to the 'myth' of objectivity and 'scientific theory'. Science, after all, simply means 'knowledge'. As Jung reminds us, we can never know the 'ding an sich' - the thing in itself - since all our knowledge - ALL of it - is experienced through the lens of the psyche. All of Jung's ideas are based on this kind of direct experience of the world through the lens of soul.

Anyway, my ramblings to toss into the Fire.

Carl Jung

I've always felt Jung's approach was empirical from the standpoint of a physician. Equilibrium, homeostasis, as in functioning as compensation and complement, as between unconscious and consciousnesses (which holds up well as we're realizing that we actually think in the unconscious and later sort out our arguments -- same for memory; we re-create it. Re-member it) . The key is to consider the psyche as real as any physical thing, just as we accept energy and matter as both "real". The unknown forces at play -- as with physics, the quantum critical mass, etc. -- also part of the exploration.

Empiricism as we apply it concerns making models. Always incomplete, never the thing itself. Think of how code works on the internet now: computers jump ahead, see patterns without models. As with our thinking, I suspect (the processing done in the unconscious), though our awareness(consciousness) functions on the Newtonian level in what we describe as the everyday "common sense" world. Empiricism augments and extrapolates beyond the mere, the sensual. Jung expands our tool kit like a Tardis. :)

Jung, truly a philosopher in the old sense: lover of wisdom, trained in the Muses, a healer and a teacher. This is a good grounding:

Maureen writes:

Dear Lovely & Beloved Deborah & Alice

[...]
Jung looks at the source energy as Pleroma (Seven Sermons to the Dead), Tao (I Ching), unus mundus (alchemy) - all names for a Ground of Being that is unexpainable but can be experienced through intuition, mysticism, creativity, ecstasy and love. Because Eros is gaining the upper hand again through Aquarian holism, Eastern and Western thought have already come together to some extent through the new kind of understanding coming out of quantum physics - the realization of the interrelatedness of all and the archetypal links between psyche, creativity and science.

OF (Jung as 'Old Fool') had no preference for 'logical' over its opposite - the world as infinite and incomprehensible. As a 'whole-some' individual, he embodied the dance of opposites. I love him because he's a guy after my own heart. I was the only bod at my high school and at Uni who leaned toward neither the arts or science, so I embraced both, while everyone else did one or the other. Both are, after all, underpinned by the same archetypal energies and so have always been two sides of the one coin of truth, as wholistic thinkers like Bohm and Pauli understand. Ditto for Jung, a self-proclaimed 'scientist of soul' - and as we all know, soul can't be objectified, weighed, analysed, explained, or in any other way dissected, or pinned like a dead butterfly. Neither can a star, or a leaf, or an atom for that matter. Is a star merely a big ball of flaming gas, or is that simply what it's made of? Jung was not 'scientifically grounded' if by that we mean someone who tries to reduces the poetry and mystery of life to rational, stagnant, objective facts and cerebral explantions.

As OF made clear, at least half of life is irrational! Someone once asked him why the Chinese had developed no 'science'. He replied that this was an optical illusion, since they had a science - the I Ching - grounded in 'general synchronicity' - the understanding that psyche and nature mirror one another meaningfully, as inseparable twin facets of a unitary ground of being. This was the only kind of science that Jung had time for - he didn't buy into the Western hubris of trying to tame and reduce life to the 'myth' of objectivity and 'scientific theory'. Science, after all, simply means 'knowledge'. As Jung reminds us, we can never know the 'ding an sich' - the thing in itself - since all our knowledge - ALL of it - is experienced through the lens of the psyche. All of Jung's ideas are based on this kind of direct experience of the world through the lens of soul.

Anyway, my ramblings to toss into the Fire.

He is the god of love, EROS:

We read about Rossetti, the Aesthetes and their eroticism. Let's go to the source.

You know how the body, nature, physics works in our experiential world: Gradients. There has to be an energy imbalance to make things flow, to do "work". And flow -- change -- is the nature of being in the sphere of time, essential to the magic of life. This understanding frames my thinking, as it did with Jung's, applied not just to the material world, but to the psyche, personal and collective. But that creator of gradients, that potential for movement, change, chaos, creation: Eros embodies that cosmic force.

---

He is bold and forward and strenuous, always devising tricks like a cunning huntsman; he yearns after knowledge and is full of resource and is a lover of wisdom all his life, a skillful magician, an alchemist, a true sophist.... but on one and the same day he will live and flourish, and also meet his death; and then come to life again through the force of his father's nature." ~Plato, Symposium

"... the Love-god, golden-haired, stretches his charmed bow with twin arrows, and one is aimed at happiness, the other at life's confusion." ~Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 549

The idealizations which Eros tends always to constellate can be counterbalanced: creativity expresses itself also as destruction. Love's torture may not always lead to the happy ending of our tale. The idealizations may further be weighted by recalling the connections in Hesiod, the Orphics, and renaissance Neoplatonism between eros and chaos.
Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity of which we have been speaking can be born. Further more, Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for revivification. ... Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and confusions which are its nests. It renews itself in affective attacks, jealousies, fulminations, and turmoils. It thrives close to the dragon." --James Hillman (Love's Torturous Enchantment, A BLUE FIRE)

Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so . . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. ~CGJung CW 7.

---

Right Harmony. That pair so important in ancient music and extrapolated into all the arts onward: the eternal, orderly and unified Apollo and the diverse and unpredictable Dionysos. The latter had the ability to make the head spin, to overwhelm, to make mad, so that one did not drink wine alone, but in a group, and only one person drinking from the vessel at a time. The idea of the fire and the moving flame, then, is reflected in the pair. And Eros is the movement, the stirring. (Just as the Apollonian Muses move the poet, the mythos.)

There is simply no abiding, no sitting still, no resolution of opposites in the field of time, especially for the force, the energy, that moves it (not to mention the sun and all the stars). This ambivalence, this two-faced nature, both creative/destructive, has been intuited in metaphor as far back as we can remember... And later, as the mythology morphs and mutates, we find Venus wed to Hephaestus--Venus, variously mother or sister of Eros; Eros, shooter of arrows, mover of stars, and Love itself--the ultimate fascination:

[Latin fascin³re, fascin³t-, to cast a spell on, from fascinum, an evil spell, a phallic-shaped amulet.]

In these same early myths, that creative fire inside the earth, that union of opposite forces, made and projected the stars that make our very bodies. (Fascinating, the way we've always known this.) The source of starlight was Hades, that place of paradox and inversion. Originally, daemons were messengers, inter-mediators between man and deity; time and eternity.

The Greek poet Hesiod tells us Eros is born of Chaos at the same time as Earth and the Tartarus. He's the comrade of Aphrodite from the moment of her birth. And he's not merely the god of sensual love. He's much more:

Eros is the power that forms the world by the inner union of the separated elements...

Throughout Plato's Symposium, speakers relate mythical accounts of Eros. There are two opposing mythologies of the origin of Eros. The opening speaker, Phaedrus (light-bringer), the “Father of Logic," introduces Eros as the first god according to the story in Hesiod. In this view, Earth and Eros are born of the whirling (“dynos”) chaos. Eros is not a personification, but a cosmological force or ordering principle (“kosmos” meaning “order”). It is as though in Hesiod’s account, matter and order are born of Chaos, are the inchoate elements of the universe in which all life originates. According to this view, Eros is a primordial cosmological mechanism.
The account of Eros as the youngest god depicted in traditional Greek mythology appears in Pausanius’ speech. Pausanius, reputed for little other than being Agathon’s lover, presents the famous dichotomy between Uranian love and Pandemic love. Pausanius shares the view that Eros is the youngest god, son of Aphrodite. There are differing accounts, however, of the nature of Aphrodite’s birth corresponding to the two different types of love: Uranian (heavenly) and Pandemic (earthly). According to the Uranian account, Aphrodite is born of the castration of Uranus. In contrast, Pandemic love derives from the view of Aphrodite as the child of Zeus and a mortal. It is here that the system of romantic relationships between an older man and a younger man, lover and beloved, is described. Ideally, says Pausanius, this relationship is to represent Uranian (heavenly) love in that the older man, or lover, is a teacher and mentor to the youth (beloved), as opposed to the older man lasciviously desiring the youth only to leave him once his beauty fades. The Uranian lover is a lifelong friend to his beloved, remaining dedicated to him after the flower of youth.
It is one of the oft-mentioned facts of the Symposium that Socrates’ speech is, oddly enough, an account of love that he received from a woman. This woman, Diotima the Delphic Priestess of Mantinea, gives an original mythical description of Eros and his parentage. In contrast to the views of Eros as both the oldest and youngest god, according to Diotima, Eros is the child of Resource (Poros) and Poverty (Penia). Because Eros’ mother is destitute, she sleeps with Resource and conceives Eros on the night of Aphrodite’s feast day. The result is an offspring who is ever in search of objects but unable to maintain them. Like his mother, Eros is ever craving, restless and desirous, yet he possesses the charms and know-how of his father. Because of his relentless conniving to possess what he does not have and his inability to maintain it, Eros is said to be a daimon. Daimon, in the Greek, means something like an intermediary or spirit, a messenger between gods and humankind.
In this exposition, Diotima also establishes that Eros is like a philosopher because he constantly seeks to find what he lacks. One cannot desire what one already possesses. If one already possesses something, one cannot desire it in itself, though one may desire the maintenance of this possession. A philosopher desires wisdom because he recognizes that he lacks it. The gods, on the other hand, do not seek wisdom as they already possess it. It is also established that though humans do not possess immortality, humankind seeks to possess deathlessness. There is a drive within humanity for different types of immortality. Procreation is a type of yearning for bodily immortality, but as it is limited to the body, it is the lowest sort of love. The highest type of love is that which, inspired by beauty, ascends to a vision of the Forms.
Socrates’ account of love is as a spirit guiding one, through the experience of Beauty, to a vision of the Idea of the Good, or the Form of all Forms, the origin of all that exists in the universe.
~EMC, The Platonic Eros

-------
extra credit:  http://angelavoss.org/wp-content/uploads/EROS.pdf
EROS Angela Voss

He is the god of love, EROS:

We read about Rossetti, the Aesthetes and their eroticism. Let's go to the source.

You know how the body, nature, physics works in our experiential world: Gradients. There has to be an energy imbalance to make things flow, to do "work". And flow -- change -- is the nature of being in the sphere of time, essential to the magic of life. This understanding frames my thinking, as it did with Jung's, applied not just to the material world, but to the psyche, personal and collective. But that creator of gradients, that potential for movement, change, chaos, creation: Eros embodies that cosmic force.

---

He is bold and forward and strenuous, always devising tricks like a cunning huntsman; he yearns after knowledge and is full of resource and is a lover of wisdom all his life, a skillful magician, an alchemist, a true sophist.... but on one and the same day he will live and flourish, and also meet his death; and then come to life again through the force of his father's nature." ~Plato, Symposium

"... the Love-god, golden-haired, stretches his charmed bow with twin arrows, and one is aimed at happiness, the other at life's confusion." ~Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 549

The idealizations which Eros tends always to constellate can be counterbalanced: creativity expresses itself also as destruction. Love's torture may not always lead to the happy ending of our tale. The idealizations may further be weighted by recalling the connections in Hesiod, the Orphics, and renaissance Neoplatonism between eros and chaos.
Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity of which we have been speaking can be born. Further more, Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for revivification. ... Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and confusions which are its nests. It renews itself in affective attacks, jealousies, fulminations, and turmoils. It thrives close to the dragon." --James Hillman (Love's Torturous Enchantment, A BLUE FIRE)

Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so . . . . He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. ~CGJung CW 7.

---

Right Harmony. That pair so important in ancient music and extrapolated into all the arts onward: the eternal, orderly and unified Apollo and the diverse and unpredictable Dionysos. The latter had the ability to make the head spin, to overwhelm, to make mad, so that one did not drink wine alone, but in a group, and only one person drinking from the vessel at a time. The idea of the fire and the moving flame, then, is reflected in the pair. And Eros is the movement, the stirring. (Just as the Apollonian Muses move the poet, the mythos.)

There is simply no abiding, no sitting still, no resolution of opposites in the field of time, especially for the force, the energy, that moves it (not to mention the sun and all the stars). This ambivalence, this two-faced nature, both creative/destructive, has been intuited in metaphor as far back as we can remember... And later, as the mythology morphs and mutates, we find Venus wed to Hephaestus--Venus, variously mother or sister of Eros; Eros, shooter of arrows, mover of stars, and Love itself--the ultimate fascination:

[Latin fascin³re, fascin³t-, to cast a spell on, from fascinum, an evil spell, a phallic-shaped amulet.]

In these same early myths, that creative fire inside the earth, that union of opposite forces, made and projected the stars that make our very bodies. (Fascinating, the way we've always known this.) The source of starlight was Hades, that place of paradox and inversion. Originally, daemons were messengers, inter-mediators between man and deity; time and eternity.

The Greek poet Hesiod tells us Eros is born of Chaos at the same time as Earth and the Tartarus. He's the comrade of Aphrodite from the moment of her birth. And he's not merely the god of sensual love. He's much more:

Eros is the power that forms the world by the inner union of the separated elements...

Throughout Plato's Symposium, speakers relate mythical accounts of Eros. There are two opposing mythologies of the origin of Eros. The opening speaker, Phaedrus (light-bringer), the “Father of Logic," introduces Eros as the first god according to the story in Hesiod. In this view, Earth and Eros are born of the whirling (“dynos”) chaos. Eros is not a personification, but a cosmological force or ordering principle (“kosmos” meaning “order”). It is as though in Hesiod’s account, matter and order are born of Chaos, are the inchoate elements of the universe in which all life originates. According to this view, Eros is a primordial cosmological mechanism.
The account of Eros as the youngest god depicted in traditional Greek mythology appears in Pausanius’ speech. Pausanius, reputed for little other than being Agathon’s lover, presents the famous dichotomy between Uranian love and Pandemic love. Pausanius shares the view that Eros is the youngest god, son of Aphrodite. There are differing accounts, however, of the nature of Aphrodite’s birth corresponding to the two different types of love: Uranian (heavenly) and Pandemic (earthly). According to the Uranian account, Aphrodite is born of the castration of Uranus. In contrast, Pandemic love derives from the view of Aphrodite as the child of Zeus and a mortal. It is here that the system of romantic relationships between an older man and a younger man, lover and beloved, is described. Ideally, says Pausanius, this relationship is to represent Uranian (heavenly) love in that the older man, or lover, is a teacher and mentor to the youth (beloved), as opposed to the older man lasciviously desiring the youth only to leave him once his beauty fades. The Uranian lover is a lifelong friend to his beloved, remaining dedicated to him after the flower of youth.
It is one of the oft-mentioned facts of the Symposium that Socrates’ speech is, oddly enough, an account of love that he received from a woman. This woman, Diotima the Delphic Priestess of Mantinea, gives an original mythical description of Eros and his parentage. In contrast to the views of Eros as both the oldest and youngest god, according to Diotima, Eros is the child of Resource (Poros) and Poverty (Penia). Because Eros’ mother is destitute, she sleeps with Resource and conceives Eros on the night of Aphrodite’s feast day. The result is an offspring who is ever in search of objects but unable to maintain them. Like his mother, Eros is ever craving, restless and desirous, yet he possesses the charms and know-how of his father. Because of his relentless conniving to possess what he does not have and his inability to maintain it, Eros is said to be a daimon. Daimon, in the Greek, means something like an intermediary or spirit, a messenger between gods and humankind.
In this exposition, Diotima also establishes that Eros is like a philosopher because he constantly seeks to find what he lacks. One cannot desire what one already possesses. If one already possesses something, one cannot desire it in itself, though one may desire the maintenance of this possession. A philosopher desires wisdom because he recognizes that he lacks it. The gods, on the other hand, do not seek wisdom as they already possess it. It is also established that though humans do not possess immortality, humankind seeks to possess deathlessness. There is a drive within humanity for different types of immortality. Procreation is a type of yearning for bodily immortality, but as it is limited to the body, it is the lowest sort of love. The highest type of love is that which, inspired by beauty, ascends to a vision of the Forms.
Socrates’ account of love is as a spirit guiding one, through the experience of Beauty, to a vision of the Idea of the Good, or the Form of all Forms, the origin of all that exists in the universe.
~EMC, The Platonic Eros

-------
extra credit:  http://angelavoss.org/wp-content/uploads/EROS.pdf
EROS Angela Voss