This essay examines how three major philosophers — Plato, Epictetus, and Nietzsche — conceptualize the human attitude toward bodily appetite and passion. Drawing on the dramatic structure of Plato's Symposium and Diotima's speech on love, it traces the Platonic ideal of transcending physical desire toward eternal beauty and wisdom. It then turns to Epictetus and Stoic philosophy, analyzing his claim that desires and aversions fall within the domain of personal will, and considering the limits of that claim. Finally, the essay connects both thinkers to Nietzsche's understanding of what lies within human power to change, framing all three positions as competing responses to the role of passion in a well-lived life.
When discussing how Plato presents the most appropriate human attitude toward bodily appetite and passion, it is vital to note that Plato's method of conducting philosophy through dialogue — as though it were a drama with characters competing for attention, yet with an overarching dramatic structure that more subtly guides our understanding of the competing arguments — makes it difficult to say what Plato himself actually thought. The Symposium's dramatic structure may give the climactic pride of place to Socrates's speech, but Plato then seemingly undercuts the loftier sentiments of that discourse on love by ending it with the farcical entry of the drunken Alcibiades.
It is important to keep this in mind before examining Socrates's vision of bodily appetites — in this case, specifically the sexual appetite. The philosophical idealizing on display may be intentionally and comedically brought back down to earth by the spirit of drunken, lustful merriment that raucously changes the tone in the dialogue's final moments.
The Symposium feels more like a one-act play than a philosophical treatise, and its dramatic aspects are worth noting. At a late-night drinking party — in which cups of wine were exchanged while participants offered learned rhetorical displays on a set topic — Socrates and others, including the comedian Aristophanes, are asked to discourse on Love. After hearing the views of a medical man and a comedian, Socrates gives us the philosopher's view of love by recounting his meeting with the wise woman Diotima.
Socrates's recounting of this past discourse with an intelligent woman — something of a rarity in the fifth-century Athenian milieu of Plato's dialogues — is what gives us the popular notion of "Platonic love," now used as a somewhat debased euphemism for non-sexual love.
Socrates's — or rather Diotima's — description is actually far more subtle than the popular phrase suggests. The idea is that the process of love involves a kind of idealization that feeds upon itself, gradually phasing out the physical or bodily element. Socrates seems to indicate that the final object of love is wisdom itself, for that is literally what "philosophy" means. The idealizing qualities of a mind in love, which work so imperfectly when applied to a physical human being with his or her own urges, desires, and aversions, work far better when directed toward intellectual and idealized categories or ideas.
One way or another, Socrates ends up likening this culmination to a heavenly beauty and a glimpse of the soul's immortality — a destination reached at the end of a love that has evolved out of the "toils" of actual, physically embodied and fully sexual love. As Diotima puts it:
He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils) — a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning. (Jowett, 48–9.)
In other words, Plato's concept of the bodily aspects of desire presents them as something to be idealized out of existence, such that love becomes the means by which we glimpse the wondrous beauty of an eternal and everlasting nature. The abrupt comic entrance of Alcibiades shortly after this lofty speech, however, seems to undercut the heady philosophizing — reminding us that love can always be reduced back to bodily instincts.
"Stoic will, aversion, and limits of self-control"
"Nietzsche on passion, will, and transformation"
Taken together, Plato, Epictetus, and Nietzsche offer three distinct but interrelated responses to the role of bodily appetite and passion in human life. Plato sees desire as raw material for a spiritual ascent; Epictetus insists that desire and aversion are fundamentally within rational self-control, even as real-world examples challenge that claim; and Nietzsche forces us to confront the deeper question of what transformation through passion actually looks like when the will meets its limits. Each position illuminates a different dimension of the enduring philosophical problem of how we should live in and with our bodies.
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