Love’s Champion: Discipline

Love is madness unless it is true love. True love blossoms from self-control triumphing over lust, just as madness erupts from a love untamed. Desirous love only has the potential to harm those it’s directed towards, unlike true love, which cultivates a friendship and allows said friendship to blossom into a relationship both beneficial and ideal.

Should love go hand and hand with self-discipline and restraint its outcome is marvelous. In that same respect, without the necessary strength of will a man needs to prevent love from turning sour, it will do just that. In Socrates’ first speech, as in Lysias’, a lover can only harm he whom he loves. “Lover” in this sense is one merely interested in fulfilling ones own desire. By being so selfish, the object of the lover’s affection is wronged disastrously.

A curious phrase that is: “the object of the lover’s affection”. Object. The maddened lover treats his love not as an equal, not as a person, not even as a human, but, rather, as a prize to be won. Once having won that prize, the lover cultivates it only to be that which he desires most in a lover, disregarding any protest on his “prize’s” part.

The theory suggested by Lysias that only a non-lover can have a meaningful relationship with someone suggests that love is purely destructive. This is not so. The

love he depicts is a ruse, a shamble of true love, a mockery of true love. Socrates shows this other side of love in his second speech, the side of love that benefits both parties.

Socrates describes true love through use of metaphor. The charioteer being pulled along by two horses, one compliant and good-natured, the other ill-tempered and disobedient, must control the horses when beauty, tempting beauty, is near. The ill-tempered horse is desire, the desire that destroyed Lysias’ version of love, a love so perverse as to devastate both parties. The charioteer must be strong so as to control that desire, and once controlled, true love can flourish.

True love starts as friendship. While the charioteer still must control the unruly horse, friendship grows in the place of the stifled longing. Mutual friendship is the foundation for true love. Having first established the foundation of friendship, desire can be added into the equation, allowing both parties fulfillment. Should the love fade, as love often does, the two will be left with an unflappable friendship, resulting in a positive finale as opposed to madden love’s destructive end.

Love can take two forms as described by Socrates and Lysias in the Phaedrus: the destructive and the pure. The path love takes is determined by the strength of the charioteer. Does the charioteer have to strength to overcome the unruly horse of desire? Or will he forfeit reason for need? Love is at the mercy of a lover’s self-control.