The last video in my series on eros in the Platonic tradition—the whole thing encapsulated in a single episode! In our time of anxious rumination, Platonic love opens up a way for the overcoming of our alienation from the world and ourselves—and the integration of the true ecstatic into our lives.

We wouldn’t be able to experience love without some degree of introspection—if we didn’t have some sort of notion that the absolute good transcends our particular good; and yet for love to realize itself requires the actually lived unity of self and other. youtu.be/e3m5rit780U

When Plato speaks of the body’s effect on the psyche, or of knowledge based on the senses, he means the mind creating objects of thought out of its sensory experiences. But the knowledge of the good open to the psyche through emotion is not like this. youtu.be/bOohkG3XGqs

In my opinion, one of the most important elements of the Platonic teaching on love and desire, and its source of deep hope, is that it leaves us the ability to see the good in some way through a radical openness to our emotions.

So how do we "action" Platonic love? As Plotinus asks, “What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there where we must go?” The dialectical process by which we ascend must be guided by the good—but how is this possible when the good is unknowable? youtu.be/BzgvDFNnrEY

Why does Diotima say our ability to see the good must come in some sense incrementally, and not all at once? Why must it be a ladder and not a leap? youtu.be/zAzybDSUu6A

Plato might seem to be saying, with his proto-phenomenological ladder of love, that human desire will always live itself out for the best, that love will find a way. But he isn’t exactly, and that points to something important in the psyche. youtu.be/mnYfsJcevaI

Even at the very climax of his most important work on love, Plato blends the humorous with the sublime. So are we meant to take him seriously? youtu.be/HWDKcKTwLT4

It’s my conviction that the main motivation of Plato was love, and so the goal driving his whole system is the sharing of deep or reasoned hope. The ladder of eros encapsulates Plato’s counter to existential despair, in both its forms. youtu.be/-ta4weVDKZY

“Is love so fragile and the heart so hollow?” The sense of being baffled by what we want is a deeply significant and often a deeply difficult moment of human inner life. But it’s not a moment we need to get stuck in. Diotima reaches down to us with a way out and up. youtu.be/TEIWGvLFPrM

Our knowledge of the good is in some sense kinetic; it is in and through the action not of some separated reasoning mind but of the whole self, this human concretion of body and psyche. This idea is at the heart of Platonic subversiveness and Platonic hope.

The prophetess Diotima continues to initiate Socrates into the mysteries of eros. What all humans—including all philosophers—really want to do is to beget/give birth in the beautiful, she says. What could she possibly mean? And what might that mean for us? youtu.be/khOxhqzEJ3Q

R.I.P. Jonathan Lear, psychoanalyst and philosopher. leiterreports.com/2025/09/22/i...

Heidegger was wrong. Western philosophy’s forgetting of Being is traceable not to Plato, but to a misreading—a forgetting—of Plato. youtu.be/hLJeaWNUkaQ

How reason and passion can work in tandem to raise us above our comfortable numbness youtu.be/wkk60NDY0EI

Oneness as the ultimate object of human desire

Love will never leave us alone, because it makes its presence felt at every moment of our lives. Eros in the Platonic tradition is not just one emotion among many but rather the principle of emotion. youtu.be/k9vd1y9GeY8

Though Platonic love may often be taken as something tame and harmless, love in the real Platonic tradition is about the most dangerous thing there is—even though it wants nothing but the good. This is why it's so important for human beings to know the good. youtu.be/QAWFDuF44G4

The theory of unconscious desire that Plato develops so brilliantly and beautifully in the Phaedrus is key to the solution of the universal problem of human self-dividedness.

Are some of us more able than others to see the good and to thereby live the best life? youtu.be/Yxf8OlrwlNg

On Not Not Reading DFW after The Yak: Fabula Mirabilis — Eleanor Fuller ( @eleanorfuller.bsky.social ) minorliteratures.com/2025/06/12/o...

Plato’s teaching on love and desire overturns one of the most basic assumptions we bring to life: that the satisfaction of our desire lies chiefly in our setting and attaining objectives for ourselves. youtu.be/nrOZRsSV6FY

Why is there often such a poignancy to homecoming, a sense that the fusion of old and new in it carries in some way the story of existence? Could it be telling us something about how we might live our best lives? Also in this episode, Plotinus invites us to a choral dance. youtu.be/LVKOAsCjdUQ

Fascinating, poignant portrait of rural life in the late Roman Empire as it transitioned to Christianity, which began of course primarily as a religion of the cities. From Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, by Gregory Shaw

“Is it, then, the centre of the soul, in a way, that we are looking for? Or should one realize that there is something else like a centre in which all ‘centres’ in a way coincide?” — Plotinus youtu.be/RJBmnox7TXU

The psyche needs reason to grow its wings back. youtu.be/EkBtKf-lbYY

"I'm in the milk, and the milk's in me!" @platonicsoul.bsky.social quoting Maurice Sendak in his latest episode? Yes indeed! Love it! 💖 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyp5...

Does a famous Platonic myth speak to a buried memory from our earliest infancy? youtu.be/Dyp5rvvO658

Beauty is key to the re-integration of the psyche. Beauty is the anti-trauma. youtu.be/i3SL4b9l0Ws

That sense of infinite loss, and Plotinus on existential low self-esteem: a misplaced zeal for things and the goals we create for ourselves, rather than that pure radiance which our own souls or personalities somehow speak of and in some way possess. youtu.be/VGnsmFZQfd4

"A soul that sheds its wings wanders until it lights on something solid."—Plato

For Plato the downfall of the psyche is a certain kind of consciousness—one in which we are making judgements in a way that does not involve the whole, our consciousness of reality as one; it is a thinking that has declared its independence from oneness.

“And we—who are we?” the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus asked about 17 and a half centuries ago. The classic Platonic answer to this question—or at least its main themes—crops up in surprising places, including the lyrics of a Canadian-American singer-songwriter.

There’s a tendency in our modern world to see intuition and other forms of immediate cognition as merely subjective. It’s why we don’t believe in wisdom any more. But that’s not good. youtu.be/HBgMqYCUC80

In the Platonic tradition, love and other ecstatic moments offer us a glimpse of the principle of everything, the ultimate object of human desire and the basis of truth. But in the modern West we are often reluctant to accept this. youtu.be/zYLoa10eASo

Plato at the Googleplex, that 2014 book attempting to popularize Plato, missed the point imho. But perhaps that shouldn't be surprising.

I can't argue with that!

Seems like we could all do with the better kind of mania right now. Too much of the nasty crazy going around. Lovely poem at the end of this one!

The sun comes from outside, or how your “blind” impulses can lead you to a new knowledge of reality youtu.be/kX_ZVntHsrw

The sun comes from outside, or how your “blind” impulses can lead you to a new knowledge of reality youtu.be/-8bBuq9f9GE

Recently published poem by @eleanorfuller.bsky.social Now I really must go to the Greek islands.

Everything—including democracy—depends on it.

Why your love is like an ocean 52nd episode of Platonic Soul dedicated to @eleanorfuller.bsky.social "I'd rather see her lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armour." -Sappho youtu.be/aP2YqbMYTlk

In today’s episode, Plato uses an argument for no-strings-attached sexual relationships as a springboard for looking deep into the psyche. Are you a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or are you a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?

Discourse and the wordless—the ecstatic—are friends. This is the core of Platonic hope. youtu.be/J2ruiE0tmHw

Happy Valentine's Day! Love--oneness--is like entering the inner sanctum of reality. youtu.be/wGdOBR_B9d8

What if the secret of happiness lies not in attaining anything, but in a different kind of seeing?

“If we try to shape the good, as so much mere material, it takes a terrible revenge by losing its life.” Rabindranath Tagore

Academic controversy over Plato points to basic differences about how we ought to grapple with reality.

Catullus lives again in this nugget of a nugatory poem by @eleanorfuller.bsky.social