Book Club: Plato “The Symposium”
Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett translation. Angie Hobbs did a great podcast on erotic love in the Symposium. Here is the Gutenberg Project’s Jowett translation. Google Books also has a translation.
As planned, today (technically, tomorrow) I’d like to get a conversation going about Plato’s Symposium. What I’ve done is to write down some questions while reading the text. They certainly aren’t exhaustive or expert, but I think they’re a start. Also, I would definitely not take them as a questionnaire. Instead of trying to answer all of them, please feel free to post comments about whatever questions strike your interest, or pose questions of your own.
The theme of the Symposium is éros, which can be defined as desire or longing, often of a passionate nature. Socrates, of course, has a very different definition. Any students of classical Greek are hereby invited to offer additional definitions.
As the framing story sets the stage, we hear about Aristodemus, a student who is in love with Socrates. A lot of students fall in love with Socrates. A repeating theme here and in other dialogues is the (homo) erotic aspect of the search for truth. Should we understand philosophical education as, in some sense, basically erotic?
The conversation turns to a recent symposium. The symposium was a sort of ritualized drinking party. Often conversation at a symposium would focus on a chosen topic. Here, the question is how best to celebrate the god of love.
Phaedrus claims love shapes our behavior by inspiring shame and the desire to be better for our lover; in particular, it gives us courage and happiness. Can’t love also engender the opposite states? Or is that not love?
Phaedrus gives the example of Achilles and Patroclus. He is very specific that Achilles is the boyfriend and Patroclus is the lover in this relationship. What does this distinction mean? Why does it matter?
Pausanias distinguishes between two loves: Common and Heavenly. Why does he call love for a woman common?
He emphasizes lifelong, devoted love relationships between men. We’ve talked quite a bit recently about the modern conception of a homosexual identity. Is Pausanias talking about something very different?
He also emphasizes the role of society in regulating courtship by deciding what behaviors are shameful or respectable. Does society still regulate courtship? How so?
Eryximachus extends the idea of good and bad love to all natural processes, with an ideal of the well-ordered or harmonious. When he talks about agriculture, this seems quite distant. But is it possible to take his semi-medical explanation as being essentially of a sort with modern psychological ideas about emotional processes?
Aristophanes, famously, explains love in terms of longing to be reunited with an original “other half”. (Hedwig and the Angry Inch Musical/Cartoon illustration here.) Jason has brought up the strangeness of the term hetairistriai, which is translated in various editions as “Lesbian”, “female homosexuals”, and “female minions”, but which seems to more accurately mean prostitutes. In the passage, Aristophanes is describing women who have no fancy for men, but are drawn to other women. This is considered one of the only descriptions of lesbians in classical literature. But why the association with prostitutes?
He also describes men who love men as the boldest, bravest and most masculine. Is Aristophanes’s idea of an undefeatable homosexual fighting force plausible?
He says of this love: “he is overwhelmed, to an amazing extent, with affection, concern, and love. The two don’t want to spend any time apart from each other. These are people who live out entire lifetimes with each other, but couldn’t say what it is they want from each other.” (192 c) Is this description really different from romantic love as we still understand it?
Agathon, instead, describes love’s youth, justice, moderation, courage, wisdom, kindness, grace, and mildness. Is he describing anything like erotic love, as we understand it? Or is this more like parental love?
Socrates, finally, describes love as a yearning towards something one doesn’t have. He recalls a conversation with the seer Diotimam who classifies love as a daemon/spirit between men and gods. It exists between ignorance and wisdom, but yearns for wisdom, goodness and beauty. It desires to have the good forever. It is here to drive us to achieve immortality by reproducing beauty in body and mind. Does this suggest that the fear of death is a motivator towards erotic love?
For Socrates, love aims at Beauty. As we develop in wisdom, we go from love of a beautiful body to love of beautiful bodies in general; and from this to a higher love of beautiful practices, and then upward to love of beautiful ideas and finally “absolute, pure, unmixed… divine Beauty itself”. This I take to mean the eternal, unchanging, transcendent, Divine form of beauty that is intelligible but not perceptible- of the sort of forms described in the Phaedo.
Is Socrates just talking about philosophy: the love of wisdom? Or does this relate to physical love? Does sexual desire have an educative value as a first step towards the eternal forms? Or are the mystics who see it as a distraction blocking the way to enlightenment right?
Finally, Alcibades shows up drunk. He’s a jealous lover to Socrates. He talks about Socrates’s distinction fighting in the Athenian campaign against Potidaea (in 432-430 BCE). Why might the frequently-lost-in-thought Socrates make a good soldier in battle?
In Alcibiades, we see love as deranging. He talks of the madness and Bacchic frenzy of philosophy and of love. Does Plato include this scene as a rebuke to Socrates’s higher discourse about love? Or does it underline the value of philosophical love? Is Socrates dishonest in speaking of higher love, while so often being involved in the irrational, lower sort?
Again, these are just a starting point. Feel free to take the conversation where you will!
One of the things that I think is amazing is that the book kicks off not with the dinner party but with two guys.
“Yo! Did you go to the party?”
“Yeah!”
“What did you talk about?”
“Well, I’ll tell you…”
The entire book is one guy’s recollection of a dinner party from at least 3 evenings back. He (accurately, I presume… though a Rashomon series of Symposium books would be *AWESOME*) then gives a retelling of the evening. Who sat where, who said what AND IN WHAT ORDER.
My god. I went over to my buddy’s house last Saturday and I wouldn’t be able to tell you what we talked about if you asked and we weren’t even drinking.Report
Yeah, I love that too. There’s a great line towards the end in which he says, basically, “I passed out, but when I woke up at dawn Socrates was still sitting around talking about the differences between comedy and tragedy to two of them who were still drinking.Report
He says of this love: “he is overwhelmed, to an amazing extent, with affection, concern, and love. The two don’t want to spend any time apart from each other. These are people who live out entire lifetimes with each other, but couldn’t say what it is they want from each other.” (192 c) Is this description really different from romantic love as we still understand it?”
Well, it’s difficult for me to talk about love for any extended period of time without talking about Maribou.
So I’ll start talking about her and me.
I suppose a modern way of saying it would be “I’ve finished ‘falling in love’. I’m there.” Sure, when you’re a kid, you find yourself full up with swooping emotions and grand statements and poetry and whathaveyou… but, as I age (and age with Maribou) I find more and more that I can’t say what it is I want from her apart from living out an entire lifetime with her.
Submarines have to periodically surface and look at the stars and recalibrate their instruments to correct for drift. I suppose that Maribou is like that for me. We don’t have to do everything together or spend every waking moment together (hell, we’re separate vacation people)… but if I go too long without surfacing, my instruments drift and I have no idea where I am.
She went to England for three weeks a few years back (2006? Help me out, honey) and the first week was *AWESOME*. I was batchin’ it, I could do whatever I wanted. Which, pretty much, was what I more or less did when she was around only less of it and with louder music. Work out, eat, smoke, whatever. I was single!
Then week two hit and I stopped sleeping. At the end of week two, I went to our little diner and ordered my usual breakfast and the waitress asked me what the hell was wrong with me. I told her that Maribou was in England and would be for another week. The next week, after Maribou came back, she went out to our little diner where the waitress proceeded to yell at her.
It’s not exciting to talk about, particularly. It’s not even particularly romantic (though, at times, it can be). She can be doing something in the computer room and I can be doing something in the room next to it and that’s good enough. When the “Stuff White People Like” people call and say that we’re not pulling our weight, we can slap a Rumpole of the Bailey dvd into the player and watch an episode or two together… but, for the most part, the point is the “entire lifetime” thing. To focus on the “what it is they want” is to miss the point entirely.Report
It’s much like that for me and my wife. You do sort of pass through that stage on the way to something more regular and stable I think. I mean, we’ve spent six months apart and it was definitely hard but possible.
I guess with Socrates, I wonder if he wouldn’t say, “Okay, sure, that’s a higher level of love you’ve got there. But, if you want to reach the highest level of love, you’ve got to be able to sit by yourself intellectually apprehending the unchanging and eternal form of Beauty.”
In which case, I might tell him to piss off.Report
Well, we spent many (many) months apart before we got married… so I think for us, we’re not likely to go back to a place where that’s okay. Particularly for Jaybird;). We’re *quite* stable, as long as no one keeps us apart for too long (11 years and counting, that we’ve been living together).
But I agree with your point about what Socrates would say, as well as your probable rejoinder. Honestly I don’t *care* if there’s some purportedly nobler way to live out there – we’ve found a way that is both necessary and sufficient to us.Report
Yeah, we lived apart for some time in the beginning and it was pretty miserable. But, I think the good part of having done it is that we know we can get through it. That said, I’m not signing up to do it again!Report
Remember Joe Bob Briggs?
Here’s a surprisingly lovely essay from him.
http://www.joebobbriggs.com/jbamerica/1990/jba900302.html
It covers both Love Connection and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Check it out.Report
I sort of miss Joe Bob Briggs.Report
“Agathon, instead, describes love’s youth, justice, moderation, courage, wisdom, kindness, grace, and mildness. Is he describing anything like erotic love, as we understand it? Or is this more like parental love?”
I think it’s important to notice that only Erximachus and Phaedrus seems to be taking anything seriously until Socrates. Phaedrus starts off somewhat naively, Pausanias is trying to get Agathon in bed, Eryximachus seems to be taking it seriously for some reason (I have no clue what to make out of that), and Aristophanes is making fun of cosmogonies. Agathon just won the Dionysian competition, and his speech is ridiculously flowery, as Socrates jokes about. I think Agathon is making love out to be himself, or an idealized version of himself, just as Socrates does the same in his dialogue with Diotima. So the speech largely acts as a set up to Socrates.
And I’m not sure how seriously to take this homosexuality stuff. Pederasty was accepted culturally, but Athens still rejected many manifestations of homosexuality, in the Phaedrus Socrates calls homosexuality “unnatural” and in the Republic homosexuality isn’t exactly accepted in the ideal state. The homosexuality gets overstated because Apollodorus is obviously in love with Socrates, to the point that he is called “the maniac.” Always questioning himself, and others, but never questioning Socrates, always fallowing him around and presumably trying to get in bed with him just like Alcibiades. And he’s the one giving us this story, curious that out of all of the people there, he remember’s Pausanias’ speech?
As for what this means about the point Plato is trying to get across, I’m not sure. Socrates is the embodiment of love, which is why he can say at the beginning that the only thing he understands is the art of love. It is only natural, then, that people should desire him erotically. And through erotic attachment to love they can learn what “Diotima” taught Socrates. How to contemplate the form of beauty itself, which is the end of that education.Report
Aristophanes was very much making fun… but you only realize that he has a knife in his hand when he twists it. His explanation of what love is still has explanatory power today. Hell, only the best comedians can do what he did there. He’s telling an obviously silly story that punches you in the nose when he gets to the end that ends up not being very silly at all.Report
Not to deny he had a point he was trying to get across, but it’s definitely not a serious story. And it’s a parody. Ironically enough, he seems to be the one other person there (before Alcibiades shows up) who gets it somewhat. Which is strange considering how he treated Socrates in The Clouds.Report
Yeah, I sort of left this out because we’d discussed it in the comments a week or so ago, but I do see Aristophanes’s appearance here as a parody of him, but one with bite.Report
It’s also a really interesting point that Socrates is the embodiment of love. I’ve never quite looked at him that way, but in the back of my mind I think that is how I’ve always understood him.Report
Plato’s cast of characters is always interesting. As Keljeck mentioned, the real Aristophanes wrote a play called The Clouds in which Socrates is portrayed rather badly. The real Alcibiades had a wild political career — he wasn’t exactly a stable statesman, so that’s probably relevant. Anyways, I’m still re-reading, so I’ll have more to say later.Report
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I can’t remember for sure, but I seem to remember another dialogue in which Socrates is speaking ill of Aristophanes. And he did indeed parody Socrates. I take his appearance here as parodic and don’t think his argument should be taken seriously- on the other hand, it does seem to lead us a step closer to Diotima’s position, so I don’t think it’s supposed to be all bad.Report