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More than any other spiritual creations those of the great ethical teachers are rooted in their personal life — and Plato's philosophy is essentially to be understood as ethical1 — every philosophical speculation on good and evil originates in the ethical experiences that entirely convulse the individual. And so also the great pathos which dominates the work of Plato, his tragic dualism and the heroic effort to overcome it, is deeply grounded in the peculiar character of this philosophical individual, in his unique fate and personal attitude to life. The Platonic life-line, however, was fundamentally conditioned by the sufferings of love, by the Platonic Eros.
The conception we are able to form of the man Plato from the documentary residue shows us no cool-contemplative scholarly nature finding its satisfactions in a keen awareness of the world, no philosophical nature whose thought and endeavor were directed at clarifying and elucidating nature as well as society, at making intelligible the confusing profusion of the given; rather does it show us a soul shaken by most powerful affects, in whom resided — allied to its Eros from which it could not be distinguished — an unsuppressible will to power over men. To educate by loving them, to love men by educating them, to establish their living together as a community based on love, those were the longings of this life, the forming of man and the reforming of his society its aim. For this reason, Plato's thinking took for its purpose nothing else than education and the state. In consequence the supreme problem became for him that of the Good: justice which is the unique justification for dominance of man over man, the only legitimization of Paideia not less than Politeia.
But the pedagogic-political accomplishments of Plato spring from the source of his Eros. When it is finally