Readings
Texts
- Plato, "Symposium" (from last time)
- Plato, "Phaedrus" (read to 257c)
- Sappho Lobel-Page Fragment 94 (Harris trans. and discussion)
- Theano, "A Letter on Marriage and Fidelity" (pdf)
Notes
Quiz Questions
- What is Aristophanes account of love?
- Why do we seek beautiful lovers, according to Diotima?
- Why do we seek to procreate, according to Diotima?
- What is the distinction Socrates offers between lower and higher erotic love?
Synopsis
Today we moved on from our discussion of the speeches given by Aristophanes, Eryximachus, and Agathon to delve more deeply into Socrates' own contribution to the Symposium.
To that end, please review the handout I put together to try to better explain the famous 'divided line'--that is, the central metaphysical and epistemological claims of Platonic philosophy.
Of course, that handout is at best a gloss of some extremely subtle philosophical issues. In that regard it cannot help but be a failure, as any "boiling-down" of substantial philosophical problems or positions would be. In my defense, this is a course on the philosophy of love and sex. Although we must preface our discussion of Diotima's speech in terms of Plato's account of the fundamental nature of reality (metaphysics) and how we might have knowledge of it (epistemology) to make any progress, we have at best a very, very crude picture.
That said, and in light of the propositions described in the handout, two particularly important claims emerge from Diotima's instruction.
1. We desire sex and seek procreation because it is the closest we can come to achieving immortality and thus partake of the eternality of the forms.
2. We desire the beautiful and love them because we are inevitably drawn by the reflection their beauty casts of the perfection of the forms.
Thus love is our being led, whether we know it or not, to the eternal, unchanging perfection of the forms and ultimately the illumination of the Good (which is also the Beautiful, and the True).
Socrates' speech in the Symposium amounts to his instruction by Diotima on the nature of love. The portrait she paints personifies a spirit that is neither one of the gods of hyperouranos, or the realm of the forms, nor one of the humans breathlessly engaged in the reflections of the forms without recognizing their source. This in-between spirit is at once impoverished and desperately needy and resourceful and cunning. Standing between us and the forms, it leads us to find beauty itself in the beautiful whom we love and immortality in the progeny we obtain from that love. Thus our desires for beautiful lovers and procreation reflect our more fundamental desires for the form of beauty and its eternality, even if--chained as we are in the back of the cave--we don't recognize it ourselves. Our daily loves and family are thus reflections or manifestations of our souls' magnificent search for goodness and beauty and truth itself.
Note that this is not to minimize or denigrate the loves of our short and imperfect (embodied) lives. For Socrates it is all the more reason to revel in them. But ultimately all love leads us, like moths to the flame, to apprehend the Good. We can be led unwittingly, as presumably most are, or we can be led knowingly, as Socrates was.
Now as we will shortly see, Socrates' speech in the Symposium sets the stage for much of the western history of the philosophy of love and many of our contemporary views on love and sex, and not always for the better, I might add.
This, I think, is why Alcibiades' speech is so important. For suppose the Symposium ended with Socrates' speech about his instruction on the nature of love by Diotima. Our understanding of love would be something sterile and instrumental. It draws us towards the Good and the Beautiful and their eternality through the goodness and beauty we find in others and, with them, our own modest shot at immortality. We would be left with the startling conclusion that those we love aren't ultimately what matters to us. And, to be sure, many of those who came after Plato took exactly this lesson from him, as we shall see. Their mistake, however, is to forget Alcibiades, the besotted, drunken lover.
I submit that one way of reading Alcibiades' coda to the Symposium is Plato's way of reminding us of the essential humanity of love. Those we love are not merely instruments of our souls' deepest desires, they are themselves reflections of the very perfections we seek. It is thus not that Plato scorns love or wishes us to scorn it. Rather, let us celebrate love for what our capacity to love shows about ourselves and what we mean to each other. The negative light in which Pausanius and, after him, Eryximachus, cast Earthly Aphrodite is, I submit, finally rejected when Plato brings the Symposium to a close with Alcibiades' speech.
Put another way, the distinction between higher love (Heavenly Aphrodite) and lower love (Earthly Aphrodite) Pausanius draws is amplified and translated into something very different by Socrates via Diotima's teaching. Higher love is an entirely intellectual desire for the rational apprehension of the forms and specifically The Beautiful (= The Good) as they exist beyond heaven in hyperouranos. All human love, then, is seen as a kind of lower love. As we will later find, this split sets love on a trajectory which is not always happy.
Again, calling merely human love "lower" should not, however, be taken as a denigration of it. It is, as I suggested, difficult to read Alcibiades speech without reflecting on the noble humanity it expresses.
We concluded our all too brief examination of the Symposium by compiling the puzzles I've been pointing out along the way:
1. Why all the layers of narrative at the very start of the dialogue?
2. What was Socrates doing on the neighbor's porch?
3. Why does Socrates, who according to the Oracle at Delphi is the wisest man of all for being the only one to know that he does not know, confess to knowing about one thing, love?
4. Why does Plato have Socrates' speech consist of a report on his instruction on love by a woman, Diotima?
5. What is the point of Alcibiades speech?
You should at this point be able to comment intelligently on each of these points, which does not of course entail that you should regurgitate how I approach answering these questions. My understanding is at best a work in progress where this text in philosophy is concerned.
Next today we moved on from the Symposium to consider some of the arguments Plato presents in the first part of the Phaedrus. Our goal was to further inquire into the nature of love as Plato understands it and to ask a question I suspect many--particularly women--ask themselves in today's hook-up culture: Is the non-lover (the 'friend-with-benefits', if you will) preferable to the lover? We considered and contrasted the reasons Phaedrus, reading Lysias' speech, gave for preferring the non-lover over the lover and the reasons Socrates gives for the same thesis. Socrates, of course, recants, but in recanting he has to explain why the madness of love he first articulates in condemning the lover is actually something to be welcomed and applauded in our lives.
Phaedrus, in more detail, is eager to repeat to Socrates what he thinks is a magnificent speech by the orator Lysias wherein Lysias argued that it is better to be loved by the non-lover than the lover. Lysias' argument is well-worn, for the lover has vices happily absent from the non-lover: He is
- Jealous;
- Over-wrought; (overly-emotional)
- Easily angered;
- Fickle;
- Unreliable;
- Possessive; and
- Needy.
In playing his flirtatious game with Phaedrus, Socrates objects that Lysias' speech is really quite repetitive and banal. Socrates improves on Lysias' speech by articulating a more defensible (though ultimately unconvincing, as we shall see) argument for the proposition that it is better to be friends with the non-lover than loved by the lover. Contrast, then, the lover with the friend. The lover seeks pleasure above all else; the friend seeks only what is best. Hence "as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover loves his beloved." The lover is above all self-serving, while the friend is trustworthy and will, unlike the lover, keep his promises for the benefit of all. The lover's passions are thus predatory and much to the lover's detriment, whereas the friend's lack of passion makes him steadfast and true.
All of which, Socrates hastily admits, is hogwash. To be sure, the lover is in the grips of a kind of madness: He is possessed by Eros. Yet not all madnesses are an evil. Why should we automatically condemn the lover's madness? Perhaps we should celebrate it instead!
There is more than a little echo of this idea in our modern vernacular. Think about some of the ways we talk about love:
He fell in love.
She was overcome by passion.
They were swept away by love.
She couldn't help herself from loving.
We made the point in talking about Aristophanes that love is often seen as having an intentionality or deliberateness all its own; it is also often seen as a force wholly beyond our will-power to control, a (possibly divine) force or madness we welcome in our lives and desperately miss when we lack it.
What sort of madness is love, though, and is madness of this sort necessarily a bad thing?
Note first of all that madness per se is not in the mind of the Ancient Greeks always mental illness or disease. It can as often be the result of divine inspiration or intervention which can lead us to great artistic and heroic achievements.
To explain the madness of love, Socrates, recall, articulates a neat view of the soul wherein it is really three distinct souls or faculties: the Tripartite Soul.
1. The Rational Soul;
2. The Spirited Soul; and,
3. The Appetitive Soul.
Understanding the madness of love in terms of our losing control to the Appetitive Soul as it pursues the beautiful--seeking, unknowingly, Beauty itself--helps to explain this notion that love is a power at once outside ourselves and yet within us, driving us on.