Plato_Symposium_Lecture 1
To
think (large use): To use concepts, to use conceptual terms in order to
articulate – verbally or mentally - a discourse that elucidates an issue, tries
to find out something, or solve a problem, through thinking. Paradigmatic
figure: the philosopher.
Traditional philosophical thinking: very comprehensive, abstract
and concerned with ‘deep’ issues like ‘the meaning and nature of life;’ ‘what
kinds of things there are’ and whether those kinds exhibit an order (ontology);
how we ought to live (ethics); what our values ought to be, and how we ought to
use them.
To
make: The action of bringing about a work by using material as means.
Work is meant to fulfill functions. Main features: Either let a purpose or end
be given, then find the means to realize it and set yourself to work in order
to realize it. (Paradigmatic figure: craftsman, engineer) Or: to have an
understanding according to which something can or might be able to be brought
about. Then set out to bring it about, whether or not the result serves a
purpose. (Paradigmatic figures: the scientist, the inventor)
To
do: Unspecific term in everyday use. Here: to perform an action as
realizing a value or a virtue. Cognitively: to know the motives, reasons,
consequences of one’s actions. Normatively: to evaluate and control one’s
actions. (Paradigmatic figures: the statesman, the saint, life lived as
‘examined life,’ the ideal democrat .)
II. My Project in this Course:
Show two samples of philosophical thinking, going back to its
founding fathers. Philosophy aspires at being the representative of thinking in
academia. Socrates – the one who did not write – was Plato’s teacher; Plato was
Aristotle’s teacher.
Plato/Socrates and Aristotle.
Two, or even three very different philosophical personae:
Socrates, the one of common origin, who questions and argues. Plato, the
aristocrat who uses Socrates’ method to gain access to eternal truths and the
good and orient his fellow citizens towards the right kind of life. Aristotle,
son of a doctor in the province, who draws the most comprehensive picture of
nature, life, man and wants to guide us towards the best possible realization
of ourselves. Plato, the artistic temperament. Aristotle, the scientific
temperament.
III. The Symposium:
1. General:
“Symposium: “to gather to drink together.” Plato makes it into a
gathering for presentations and discussions.
Choosing to have “speeches in praise of ‘Eros’ lets the speeches be of the rhetorical genre of the encomium, i.e. of a speech meant to
praise, normally a person. Does praise get in the way of truth? (fast-forward
to Agathon and Socrates’ questioning of Agathon).
Philosophizing is here performed in the form of drama: enacted on
a scene, be it as exchange of dialogue, be it as soliloquy of speech, be it of
scenic description. The frame is not exploratory, but laudatory. In addition,
the participants compete for ‘best laudatory speech.’ Is that doing ‘thinking?’
Can one think ‘competitively?’ What is the significance of presenting thinking
in this form? Drama, narrative fiction, myth - and truth.
7 Speeches: Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes,
Agathon, Diotima, Alcibiades. Opened, interrupted, joined by dialogues:
Apollodurus and friend. The whole reported by Apollodurus who relates to his
friend what he has been told by a certain Aristodemus (173B.2), who was present
but did not participate in the debate. Both narrators pop up in the text from
time to time to remind us that we are reading something that is narrated, and
to tell us apparently anecdotal things like Aristophanes’ hiccup. 1001 Nights!
Functions
of frame.
Temporal distance alerts to destinies of participants after
Symposium, Alcibiades deeds and treason.
The two narrators are Socrates fans. Perspective: selection and
representation are favorable to Socrates.
Speeches and dialogues present very different ideas of love, or
love in many different manifestations. Are they ordered? Is there a thread?
Three orders: (1) Different aspects and points of view;
multiperspectivalness. (2) Later ones criticize and supercede earlier ones; a
line of ascendance. (3) What is missing in one speech is provided by another; a
cumulative effect, complementation.
2.
The Speeches:
Phaedrus
presents love in the embellishing light of greatness, nobility, and as a device
that confers virtues. His picture of love is the idealized love in a society of
heroic values. An army made of lovers would be more courageous than other
armies (178E.4). Lovers are prepared to die for each other. Love guides lover
and beloved in giving them a sense of shame and pride. With those senses one
“acts well” (178D.2).
Phaedrus, the beautiful young man with whom Agathon is in love
(and Socrates elsewhere), tells us what he thinks one ought to say. His picture
is entirely normative. Does not find much support in the facts. Is the heroic
ideal really the best thing one can say about what or how love ought to be?
Pausanias
exploits the weaknesses of Phaedrus’ speech. He also articulates a normative
ideal. Some of it more what he would like love to be than what others
think it is or ought to be! His strategy is to distinguish low and high love:
Heavenly and Common Aphrodite. The interesting core of his position is how he
distributes aspects and manifestations of love over the two sides.
Common Aphrodite
|
Heavenly Aphrodite
|
|
|
|
|
Of body |
Of soul |
|
Main object: intercourse, physical intimacy |
Abstain from intimacy |
|
|
|
|
Each keeps his own and watches over his own |
Share everything |
|
Short-lived |
Stay together one’s whole life |
|
|
|
|
For object: Yield quickly |
Resist, test the interest of suitor |
|
To seduce or let oneself be seduced by wealth or power |
To be motivated by genuine affection |
|
Under conditions of ‘common love’ it is shameful to be deceived |
If conditions of ‘heavenly love’ are fulfilled, it is not
shameful to be deceived |
Observations
and problems:
Pausanias is an ideologue of homosexuality and of the Athenian
ways.
His stated ideal is a
relation between an older man and an adolescent approaching adulthood that is
not lived as passion and physical intimacy, by someone who imposes restraint on
himself as concerns intimacy, preferably in Athens. The normative ideal, then,
is a male, homosexual relation without intimacy. And the Athenians are the only
cultivated people. Women are not even considered as lovers, only as objects of
love. Law forbidding affairs with young boys.
Sketches a special normative ethics for his preferred relation.
(Important for the relation between Alcibiades and Socrates at the end).
Pausanias calls it “freedom.” Among the rules for what is right and honorable
in a homoerotic relation:
Publicly declare your interest is honorable.
Conquest (of what kind?) is noble.
Attempt at conquest justifies actions otherwise dishonorable such
as servility and public self-humiliation directed at the beloved.
Does love require and justify a code of its own?
Pausanias is not very explicit about what it is to give oneself to
another man (183D.7). Would it not mean that, for a noble man, it is right to
engage in intimacy, but for someone who is not noble that is not the case? A
self-licensing and unethical effort, hidden behind the apparent ‘high’ moral
stance? Aristophanes’ hiccup as critical response!
After the conventional praise of ‘Eros’ by Phaedrus, and
the self-serving propaganda speech of Pausanias (homosexuality and Athens) –
both predominantly normative, partial, ideologically and personally biased - we
get into different water with the speeches of Eryximachus and Aristophanes. They
offer different models of love, expressed in two different media: discourse and
myth. Praise (encomium) is not absent, but recedes into the background.
Eryximachus makes a particular effort to divert the waters of love
to his craft: medicine.
Love as a dynamic
principle: “it directs everything that occurs” (186B.3). The whole world is
supposed to be ‘love’s labor.’
Leading idea: Opposites underlie what we encounter. Things are in
good order only when opposites are brought into harmony. When the opposites are
not brought into harmony the phenomena will be in disorder. Love is the
regulatory principle, in fact a deity, that brings about order and
disorder in the phenomena. Good order is the work of the good kind of love;
disorder is the doing of the bad kind of love. There are thus two species of
love: ‘bad-love’ and ‘good-love.’ One is regulating. The other is deregulating.
Problems:
Eryximachus’ model of
love loses the specificity of love, paying for the ubiquity
of Eryximach’ean
‘love’ the price of saying very little about what love is for us.
Is love for us a
general binding and unbinding principle? What does that mean?
What happened to
beauty and erotic pleasure?
Eryximachus adopts, and adapts
analogizingly, Pausanias’ moral distinction between the two kinds of love.
‘Good’ love works towards concord between opposites, ‘bad’ love towards
discord. The model of basic oppositions brought into harmony by something
external to the oppositions, and the idea that ‘bad love’ is a principle of
discord in the cosmos are not coherently developed by Eryximachus.
It is also an inadequate idea of love
because it leaves out the ideas of desire, attachment, and the role of beauty.
We do not recognize our love in Eryximachus’ ‘love.’ But the dynamicity and
regulatory ideas are important elements of an adequate concept of love. (cf.
Diotima: to give birth in beauty, 206B9). Ultimately, he simply introduces a
new concept of love, a concept that does not fit the phenomena we experience as
love.
Aristophanes:
Pivotal. The only attractive seriously competing model to
Diotima/Socrates conception! Eroticism at the center.
Use of myth/story and irony as media.
Articulates fundamentals of the ‘Erotic’ in a tongue-in-cheek way. Central
model: erotic love is desire for a unity that is never achieved, but
nevertheless brings about unions of different kinds (191D). Introduces the
concept of desire.
Myth is the principal means of
articulation. Ideas need to be found by interpreting a story. Our present being
and present dispositions shaped by ‘love’ are supposed to have come about in
the following way:
- First phase: As yet, there is no
place for love, as we understand it. Three kinds of gendered beings and their
modalities: purely male, purely female, mixed male and female. Each being has 4
arms, four legs and two faces. Genitals are also double. Each of the different
kinds is offspring from a planet: male from sun, female from earth, mixed from
moon. (Being round because one’s forebears are round pokes fun at analogizing
argument (à
Eryximachus). But there may be an allusion to the idea that the earth is also
round!). Our ancestors move like balls or tumbleweed. (No intercourse and
sexual reproduction in phase 1. Arch-beings are gestated in the earth like
cicadas.
Change initiated by hubris of humans
intending to attack the gods. Different scenarios. Zeus forms plan to cut them
in two, and to threaten them with further division.
-
First modification and second phase: Halving
of humans. Head turned around. Skin drawn over wound and refashioning of body.
Upright gait. Decisive consequence for the origin of love: longing for lost
unity and wholeness (191A.6). But that longing is not yet erotic longing,
for it is as yet unrelated to sexual union, still unproductive and
un-reproductive. Genitals still at the side away from the faces.
Further changes are triggered by
unproductive effort to grow together again. Humans would die out. Zeus
intervenes a second time. Then
-
Second modification and third phase: Sexual
organs are moved to front and put into present places. Change of reproductive
mode. Now “at the interior” and requiring sexual union of male and female
genitals, instead of ‘out of the earth.’ Acting from a desire for wholeness and
acting towards reproduction are amalgamated into one act. They are real merely
in the relation between male and female, originally the mixed ‘whole’ being.
Note the ironical distinction of homoerotic and hetero-erotic lovemaking, also
letting the two modes appear as purely functional and biological differences
without a difference in value (against Pausanias). First recognition of lesbian
orientation, also as equal.
Ideas
about love expressed in the ‘genealogical’ mode of Aristophanes’ myth:
Different gender orientations (homo-/hetero-) are equal. Each
fulfills specific social functions. For example: homosexuality generates
politicians and “lovers of love.” (Opposes preference for male homosexuality),
heterosexuality generates offspring.
The physical aspect of love is emphasized and recognized as
worthy. ‘Eros’ is, among other things, pleasure in sexual union, both physical
and mental.
(Opposition to soul-love as better
part of love in preceding speeches).
‘Explanation’ for and recognition of becoming stricken by love: we
happen upon our lost other half. Also explanation of ‘this is the one and only
…’ (193C.5)
(Accounts of what happens to and in lovers were absent from
previous speeches, or pointed to inadequate motives).
Explanation of desire for fusion. Hypothesis that, if we could
we’d want to “melt together” as account of the deep bond between lovers. (Is
this tongue-in-cheek?). ‘Desire’ becomes a motive that is unable to attain its
end, and therefore recurs.
2 major achievements in Aristophanes, (deeper in insight than
Diotima’s position?): (1) desire in love is not originally erotic. Its goal is
restitution and return to lost completeness. Desire is never satisfied in the
act of sexual union; (2) erotic pleasure and its function in reproduction are
add-ons. Explanation for joy in pure desire even without satisfaction of erotic
component, and essential lack of fulfillment as features of love (192D.1)
Finally, the conclusion that praises love (193 C and 193 D).
Irony, and bow to genre of encomium?
Medium: the story is of course non-sense as historical account.
But Aristophanes’ unlikely story carries more and better truths than the more
discursive speeches. It would be particularly interesting to explore in greater
depth how the theses are hung into the narrative, or how the narrative shows
the theses.
Problems:
Can Aristophanes’ theses be differently accounted for, in case the
absurd assumptions of the myth are dropped? How would one go about doing that?
Aristophanes’ myth catches major tensions of love, but still over-rationalizes
them by offering a mythical account. Does it make sense to think that erotic
encounters and sexual union express a desire for fusion? Is the
‘coup-de-foudre’ – ‘love at first sight’ – adequately understood as relying on
memory, and not just a sudden and unexplainable event? (Same for gender
orientation).
Documents praise without truth. Empty beauty of speech.
Another playwright, but of tragedies. Also a follower of the
sophists. Also supposed to be the most beautiful man in the group. Also, later,
someone who aligns himself with a tyrant.
Agathon’s main claim: I am praising the God ‘Eros’ by, before all,
saying what he is and, secondarily, saying what he gives us. Throws in a huge
number of value terms of praise: ‘Eros’ is the happiest, the most beautiful,
the best. Young (meant as praise), delicate, dwells in the softest, possesses
fluid supple shape, good looks, exquisite coloring of skin, settles where the
atmosphere is flowery and fragrant.
Moral character, probably meant to exhibit ‘Eros’’ gifts: ‘Eros’
does not suffer or inflict injustice, promotes moderation, the most brave,
seems to produce the best of everything, (poets, artisans, animals, …). Agathon
ends with a list of everything that counts as good and claims that this is the
doing of ‘Eros.’
Agathon’s success is palpable in the applause. Agathon spoke well.
But did he praise the God? In one sense he did: He mentions good things, and
attributes them to ‘Eros.’ Agathon praises merely in the sense of saying
something good about ‘Eros.’
In his questioning of Agathon, Socrates requests more: “I
thought you should tell the truth about whatever you praise” (198D.4).
Question: Why should adequate praise depend on truth of things said in praise?
Praise is supposed to have practical consequences.
Agathon and Socrates operate with two different ideas about praise
and the function of speech.
Praise, Idea # 1 (Agathon): To adequately praise is to
successfully praise. To praise successfully is to get the addressees of praise
to think highly of the one who is the object of praise. Background: either
there is no such thing as truth – or: truth does not matter for positive
opinion about object. (the Sophists).
Praise, Idea # 2 (Socrates): Praise serves the purpose of making
us rely on or want to emulate the being who is the object of praise. We are
justified in relying or emulating only if what the one who is the object indeed
has the qualities for which he is being praised. Otherwise the praise is empty
and even dangerous. We may be relying on someone who ought not to be trusted. Or
emulate someone and thereby emulating qualities that are not praise- worthy.