Power is measured volumetrically; it hums, and need not be cooked

One of my favorite episodes in The Republic, and coïncidentally one of the few that I can actually remember, comes when Socrates remonstrates with Glaucon about the ways of the amorous:

Do you need to be reminded or do you remember that, if it's rightly said that someone loves something, then he mustn't love one part of it and not another, but he must love all of it?

I think you'll have to remind me, for I don't understand it at all.

That would be an appropriate response, Glaucon, for someobody else to make. But it isn't appropriate for an erotically inclined man to forget that all boys in the bloom of youth pique the interest of a lover of boys and arouse him and that all seem worthy of his care and pleasure. Or isn't that the way you people behave to fine and beautiful boys? You praise a snub-nosed one as cute, a hook-nosed one you say is regal, one in between is well proportioned, dark ones look manly, and pale ones are children of the gods. And as for a honey-colored boy, do you think that this very term is anything but the euphemistic coinage of a lover who found it easy to tolerate sallowness, proved it was accompanied by the bloom of youth? In a word, you find all kinds of terms and excuses so as not to reject anyone whose flower is in bloom.

If you insist on taking me as your example of what erotically inclined men do, then, for the sake of argument, I agree.

(474c–475a)

The fact that the other episode I remember moderately well is that in which Socrates approvingly quotes Sophocles suggests that I'm really only interested in philosophy for the sex.

I'm not so interested in the first paragraph quoted, about part/whole relations and loving; it's just there for context. But I do think it's interesting that Glaucon admits both that Socrates has got the number of the erotically inclined and that he is erotically inclined. I assume that the erotically-inclined man, when he sees a hook-nosed boy in the bloom of youth, doesn't merely say, in order to flatter him, that he has a regal look, but thinks all the while that the hook of his nose is actually kind of unfortunate, cute snub-nosed boys being more his speed. The EIM is, I assume, sincere in his praise; whatever qualities the youth with whom he's currently taken possesses, he sees them in some positive light or other. Glaucon, however, knows that he's an EIM; he ought therefore be able to see a youth whose bloom has withered and think something like Pheidippides over there's hooked nose is pretty unfortunate, but had I come across him a few years ago, I'd have thought him—of all people!—regal, but also, when passing his eye over a youth in full flower, be able to think something like I probably only think that Alcibiades is regal-looking because I'm so taken with him in general—otherwise I'd probably think he's got an ugly hook nose or something, even if that thought is immediately followed by one running but he does look regal, all the same!.  Without the addition—if he could be talked out of his assessment that easily—something looks fishy.  With the addition, we have irony (I thought that somewhere in Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik Frank referred to the romantic-ironic attitude as one of judging that p, while simultaneously holding in mind that it could have been ¬p (and really insofar as both of those are determinate positions, neither is satisfactory, but such positions are the only ones we can take) (except without the sentence letters, of course; he's too class for that), but now think I may have either been making that up, or just didn't look in the right place, or actually read it elsewhere, or something; anyway, I didn't find any such characterization, though I continue to think it's an acceptable statement. I did find this, though, "das vollkommene Schema der Ironie: alles Positive wird zugleich gesetzt und von einer nachfolgenden Position auch wieder dementiert bzw. vernichtet"—there's something a little odd about "zugleich" and "nachfolgenden", though I suppose the former needn't have a temporal interpretation*), but not an irony of the sort Hegel, in the lectures on aesthetics, claims to find in Schlegel, in which everything is up to the positing "I".  Such a conception wouldn't be able to make much sense of the back-and-forth embodied in irony, the succession of creation and annihilation: for why would that be the result of the empty subjectivity which Hegel (justly) mocks? Though certainly Schlegel does say things that lend support to Hegel's dismissal of him (Kritische Fragmente 37, eg). Though Schlegel is also aware, I think, of the potential downsides; there's a paragraph in Lucinde (an absolutely terrible novel that no one should ever read) in which he describes Julius not doing anything at all because "he had hardly ever neglected his art more than when he deluged himself and his friends with projects for all the works of art he wanted to finish and which in the first moments of enthusiasm already seemed complete". The problem of a project's seeming complete practically as soon as barely adequately conceptualized, and the project's therefore never being realized, is just what one would expect of the ironist as Hegel depicts him (it could, of course, have other sources as well; I, no ironist, suffer from this problem in extremis).

But these bad emptily subjective traits, even if they might be closely allied with ironists, aren't a necessary part of the theory; the EIM can sincerely avow his admiration for the honey-colored sallow boy even as he's aware that his doing so is part of his captivation and, were he not captivated, he would not think so—

*It turns out I was thinking of p 181 in Fred Rush, "Irony and Romantic Subjectivity", in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis—a good collection. (but what about 182---the need to at least seriously entertain other points of view? glaucon might try to see the honey-colored boy as sallow, and might fail, confirming his love, but he also might train himself to succeed. how to deal with that?)