Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Erotica – Thinking about Plato’s Symposium


~by David Aiken~

At times my email exchanges with former students go something like this:

Student: What do you think about witchcraft? Do you have any favorite books?

Teacher: Excuse me?!! Do I look like Wikipedia? You can't just continue to ask me questions without giving any of you...!What about the plan to sail around the world? Who are your favorite storytellers?

Student: Okay okay... Forget the witchcraft talk... Let's talk about Love instead... What do you think of love? A goal of life? What's your take on soulmates?

Teacher: Good morning, kiddo! I'm afraid I don't do the soulmate thing... the idea first came out of Aristophanes, a comedic poet who fuses the souls of Robin Williams, George Carlin, and Eddie Murphy. So, the idea is not born of a reasoning at all, but rather of comedic inspiration! What would I say about Love? I suppose it would be something like: keep the sentimentality, but don't be blinded by it; and keep up, daily, the discipline of being actively considerate of the Other. Does that do anything for you?

Student: Ha, those words of wisdom inspired a smirk...

The most recent thread with this particular student begins with yet another in a running string of random questions, which happened, this time, to be ‘about’ —kind of — witchcraft. Of course, this rather scanty exchange is only representative; but I have to admit that many times these long-distance dialogical nuggets leave me bemused, other times stymied.
This particular interrogative snippet had the virtue of leaving me both bemused and stymied. Such is the alchemy of the philosophical life of the mind, however, that it also got me to think along the track of the Goals & Purposes of our life.

Georgia O'Keefe's Black Iris
It is a peculiarity about our world that continues to mystify us—which is to say that sometimes, just like with Georgia O’Keefe’s images, things are not entirely as they seem to be. There are going to be times, for example, when a flower is really not just simply a flower…
            Like Life itself attending to its vast variety of flowering activities, Thinking, as well, is fundamentally an erotic activity. And True Philosophy, which seeks to grasp in its noetic embrace whatever Insight and Clarity may be obtained from thinking about Man-in-the-world, is the highest of all erotic activities.
            In contrast, in those rare moments where we take the proverbial step back in order to take stock of our life and times, often enough it just seems that the life that looks back at us in the mirror of our mind’s eye, reflects a disturbing reality: that we are losing our way in the meandering Trivia Vitae of the day-to-day. And yet we start out so well!
When we are young… looking forward to changing the world—the world, and the actualization of our Life in that world, seems to us such a haven of promise and potential. Then at some point we seem to enter into a mist-bedecked bog of banalities, which encumber and indeed constitute the part-and-parcel reality of living day to day… cleaning toilets; washing dishes; doing laundry; getting achy, or sick, even just a little sneezy and coughy; cleaning up after the dog, or the children; folding clothes; eating; drinking; staring out the window; cleaning up in the garden; reading; watching movies; talking; not-talking; crying; feeling sad; feeling joy; feeling nothing in particular; remembering; wondering what could have been. These are the quotidian non-events that end up marking the path of our individual and rather trifling passage through the spaces of the world.

Yet, there is a wisdom tradition in Western philosophy that tries to show us a way out of the bog—how we may transcend the banality of simply-living. This is a wisdom that inspires us to craft our Life as an erotic composition; to transform ourselves into design art.
To be sure: we did not ask to be thrown into this Flood of Life. So, it is easy to believe, as we swim around looking for handholds to help keep our heads above water, that there is no particular purpose to our particular life. Yet, as a matter of fact, there are actually an infinite number of erotic purposes to our being in the world, each one of which takes the form of the Other. Including the Other that is our-self.

One of the truly inspired, and inspiring, erotic traditions of the West can be found in the philosophical framing of Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium, in which he dramatically stages for our viewing pleasure and edification an episode from the life of Socrates. Plato’s principal purpose in writing the Symposium, from this point of view, may well have been to represent to us that it is not the body-life, but the philosophical life of the individual, that is in fact the highest form of the truly erotic life.
On this argument, the basic ephemerality that characterizes sexual pleasure, is an obvious indication that such transient eroticism subsists on only the very lowest rungs of the ladder of eroticism. However, worlds beyond the fleeting physicality of bodily eroticism, there exists the enduring eroticism that awakens the soul’s or mind’s desire to be united with Understanding and Meaning—with Knowledge. This is the story of Socrates in the Symposium. Or, to put it as does James Arieti (1991, 99): “[E]ach speaker takes the topic of sex and etherealizes it until we get the quintessential transformation of sex into philosophy by Socrates.”

§ Madness in the tradition of Eros & the Daimon. Making sense of Diotima’s argument in Plato’s Symposium.
In the history of western philosophical ideas, bliss and madness have been most famously linked either with the erotic (e.g., Eros, in the Symposium), or with the demonic (e.g., the Daimon, in the Euthyphro). Tracing that extended history would be a work unto itself. The immediate interest of this reflection, however, is to appreciate the significance of Diotima’s curious argument recounted by Socrates and represented by Plato in the Symposium (setting ca. 416 b.c.e.). For it shall turn out that Diotima’s argument, as well as Plato’s mise en scène of Socrates’ retelling of that argument, shall ultimately constitute the cornerstone in the history of an idea whose dramatis personae shall be both Eros and the Daimon.
The general consensus of just about everyone who has an opinion on the topic, is that the subject of the Symposium concerns “Love.” This idea shall consequently go on to become the cornerstone in the history of the multi-faceted idea of Love in Western thought. Despite the popularity of this opinion, i.e., that the philosophical subject of the Symposium is really about Love and things erotic, this ‘read’ necessarily ignores or chooses to understate the clear textual-narrative import, perhaps not of the decontextualized Symposium qua keystone text in a constructed tradition of erotic literature, but certainly of Diotima’s speech, which textually constitutes the Symposium’s Socratic frontispiece.
Socrates is clearly the protagonist of this dramatic piece, which is more or less to be expected in Platonic literature. And, while Plato uses Diotima’s speech in an interesting twist, structurally, to represent Socrates’ own ‘position’, her speech, i.e., Socrates’ rendering and interpretation of her speech, is wholly devoted to theological, rather than to sexual, ideas, both in its framing and in its import.

The importance of the textual structure of the Symposium needs no longer to be established, following Allan Bloom’s decisive analysis in Love & Friendship. But, as usual with academics, the debate does not end there. Cobb (7-8), for instance, takes Arieti to task, citing his view on this point to be too “extreme.” Because, per Cobb: “[Arieti] argues that the dialogue is not a serious philosophical investigation of the nature of love. Rather it is a demonstration of the craft of theologizing. […] What the drama shows us […] is how the depicted nature of the god in each case bears a striking resemblance to the character of the speaker who is characterizing him. In other words, the Symposium is a dramatic depiction of the fact that when human beings discuss the gods, they tend to make the gods in their own images.”
While it seems that Cobb reads Arieti correctly, this theologizing interpretation of the Symposium is absolutely not extreme. In fact, it is right on the money. With Arieti, it is clear that we are not far removed from a type of skeptical thinking that defined the Pre-Socratic poet-philosopher-theologian Xenophanes, one of Plato’s philosophical predecessors, who was the first of the ancient philosophers to espouse a pragmatic skepticism concerning the gods:  Fragment 6. “But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own-horses like horses, cattle like cattle.”
This early form of philosophical skepticism vis-à-vis things divine, of course, will also pave the way for the later epistemological skepticism concerning things of the gods that will come to define Socrates’ famous claim to ignorance:  The god who speaks through the oracle, he says, is truly wise, whereas human wisdom is worth little or nothing (Apology 23a).” This is not a Socratic one-off, either; because theological skepticism also entirely frames Socrates’ argument against young Euthyphro, who believes he is carrying out the will and purpose of the gods.

And yet, oddly enough, it is in fact seldom that one finds in the scholarly literature a voice, such as Arieti’s, that actually recognizes the profound otherworldliness of Plato’s Symposium. And even when there is such a voice for Platonic literature in general, its interest in things theological in the Symposium is usually cursory. Such is the case with Martha Nussbaum’s treatment, for example, when she asserts that, from Plato’s point of view, the Symposium is actually a “condemnation of Socrates’ otherworldliness.” Whatever. The approach adopted by Stanley Rosen (1968: xxxv, xxxvii) is only marginally broader, for his study of the ‘erotic’ in the Symposium skips over the most obvious, baser conditions of physical eroticism, which, however, constitute the majority of the speeches in the Symposium, and jumps automatically into bed with philosophical eroticism.
As we know from the Republic, Eros is inseparable from hybris; according to the Phaedrus, it may take the form of a divine madness. In the Symposium we are presented with a “phenomenological” account of the transformation of human hybris into the divine madness of the philosopher. Thus the most important theme of the Symposium is the hybris of Socrates, as well as the problem raised by his peculiarly unerotic nature. […] I have found it necessary to deal at greater length with sexuality and pederasty in particular than with such topics as the theory of Ideas or the nature of rational discourse. This allotment of space is not an expression of the author’s tastes; it is dictated by the material under analysis.

But, then, all these divergent appreciations of the Symposium do nothing more than to reflect, in fact, the nut of the matter about how to interpret the Symposium philosophically. Diotima’s speech is central to understanding this drama. Per Cobb (1993:13): “There is some divergence of opinion among interpreters on this matter. Virtually everyone sees Diotima’s views as the key, but not everyone understands her vision in the same way.”

Diotima’s speech is about the gods and other types of divinities that populate the Greek religious and mythological landscape; it is not about things erotic in general; the layer of erotica constitutes only the framing for the mythological subtext. So then, in the final analysis, Diotima’s speech, and thus the Socratic point of view that is supposed to win out over the other points of view represented in the Symposium, is not directly relevant either to things erotic or to a supposed Western tradition of Love. Although this argument directly contradicts Simon Goldhill’s thesis, who argues that the West has inherited the ‘Greek Body’; and who (2004:72) will therefore see the Symposium as an element of an erotic inheritance from the Greeks, “the bible of Greek love.”
            I would also like to suggest, additionally, and somewhat counter to the interests of the chronologizing tradition of historians of philosophy, that Plato composed the theologically rich Symposium in order to explain, amplify upon, and perhaps to justify, the legal charges made against Socrates in the Apology. Socrates was executed by the Athenian state on charges that he corrupted the youth of Athens and that he introduced new gods [read: his daimon] into Athenian society. In a further step, it is also extremely plausible, in light of the blasphemy changes made against Socrates at his trial, to argue for an explanatory and contextual narrative linking of both the Symposium and the Euthyphro with the Apology.

Generally speaking, Socrates, and especially the Socrates of the Apology, is presented through a politicized prism. Leo Strauss is perhaps most obvious in this regard: “According to [Our Great Tradition], political philosophy was founded by Socrates.” Similarly, the great historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston (1946:108) also suggests that as a rule of thumb it is clear that the Socrates of the Apology was principally concerned “with political life in its ethical aspect. It was of the greatest importance for the Greek who wished to lead the good life to realize what the State is and what being a citizen means, for we cannot care for the State unless we know the nature of the State and what a good State is. Knowledge is sought as a means to ethical action.” This political perspective is fairly representative of the philosophical party line on how to interpret the Socrates of the Apology.
            William James (1965: 324), on the other hand, who delivered his Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion between 1904-1906, maintains with infinitely more insight that despite the law-court framing of the narrative, the ‘focus’ of the Apology is clearly religious, because it evolves around the divine ‘ministry’ of Socrates to Athens. It is clear from the Apology, he says, “[t]hat Socrates conceived himself as a divinely-appointed minister to Athens.” The textual support that can be mustered for his point is just short of becoming a litany.
“It is the God who has laid this duty upon me…” (Apology 33C); “[M]en of Athens, so far from pleading my own cause, …I am pleading yours, lest by condemning me ye should sin in the matter of God’s gift to you…” (30D ff.); “[I]f I say that to do this [i.e., go away, dwell in exile, keep silent] would be to disobey the God, you will not believe me, but think I speak ironically.” (37E); “I should be guilty of a crime indeed, if…I should desert the post to which I am assigned by the God; for the God ordains…that I should follow after wisdom and examine myself and others.” (28E).

Fowler (1995: 66) confirms the relevance of this interpretation of the Socrates of the Apology when he says: “The high moral character and genuine religious faith of Socrates are made abundantly clear throughout this whole discourse.”

In the best of cases, the historical dating of Plato’s dialogues into “early,” “middle,” and “late,” is a hazardous task. The Symposium, for example, is putatively dated from 385-380 b.c.e., and therefore assigned to the ‘middle-period’ by most scholars. Kenneth Dover, however, compellingly argues for a composition date of 384-379, which would, in his estimation, make it one of Plato’s early period dialogues. To add to this historicizing complexity, no less an authority than Gregory Vlastos (1995:6ff) makes a compelling argument for the early composition of the Apology, although scholarly consensus considers this traditionally to be one of Plato’s middle-period dialogues, dating from around 385-380.
At the end of the day, though, Rosen’s (1968: xxxiv) argument is more compelling, that the historical evolutionary theory that frames nineteenth century hermeneutics, and which motivates the placement and occasionally the very interpretation of Plato’s dialogues, is unsubstantiated by antiquity and “ignores the … nature of the dialogue form.” Strauss (1980, 3) agrees with Dover’s assessment: “Whatever we might have to think of these decisions [about dating and sequencing the dialogues], the Platonic dialogues are admittedly not reports, but works of art; they do not permit us to distinguish incontestably between what Socrates himself thought and the thoughts that Plato merely ascribed to him.” Finally, Howland (1991:194ff; cf. esp. 196, nt. 16) asserts that the dating of the narratives has no bearing on meaning in the various texts: “the chronological order of Plato’s writings, if it is relevant at all, has no special claim to interpretative significance,” and is quite thorough in combing through the relevant literature of antiquity.

So, in an attempt to avoid unnecessarily stepping on any historical philosophical toes, and because treating of things erotic per se is really quite rare in Greek literature or philosophy (and in fact this “treatise” may well be unique in the literature), I will argue for a not entirely new idea: that of a narratival rather than a chronological linking between the Symposium and the Apology.
There are two good reasons for suggesting such a narrative link. In the first place, it has the historicizing advantage of offering an adequate explanation for why Plato writes the Symposium. Secondly, linking the Symposium to the Apology has the felicitous advantage of being efficient, in an Ockham’s razor sort of way, because then one does not need to ‘invent’ an erotic ‘tradition’ to explain anomalous texts. Cobb (1993:2) does this, for example, when he reduces the Symposium to a compilation of ‘monologues’ about the nature of love. And while Allan Bloom (1993:33) claims not to do this, he nonetheless knows of such a tradition: “I have constructed no schema to act as a clothesline on which to hang all the books of the tradition, as the estimable and enduring Denis de Rougemont does in his Love in the Western World.”
So, rather than positioning the Symposium in a dubious tradition of Greek Love literature, it is preferable to adopt an interpretative strategy that links both the Symposium and the Euthyphro to the Apology. This reading strategy allows for the more satisfactory explanation of Socrates’, via Diotima’s, apparently non-sequitur theological perambulation on the distinction between gods and daimoni. In our view, we simply allow for the original purview of their evening’s reflections, which was to be a series of encomia on Eros, the god. We are not compelled to embark on the very long road of explaining in what way Diotima’s speech, which is not overtly or even remotely about things erotic, must really be fundamentally erotic in nature.

Further readings and references:
·      Arieti, James. 1990. Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama. MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
·      Bloom, Allan. 1993. Love & Friendship. NY: Simon & Schuster.
·      Cobb, William S. 1993. Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Translated by William S. Cobb. NY: SUNY Press.
·      Rosen, Stanley. 1968. Plato’s Symposium. Hew Haven: Yale University Press.
·      Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 165-199), quoted by Cobb (1993, 8).
·       Goldhill, Simon. 2004. Love, Sex & Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives. London: John Murray (Publishers).
·       Strauss, Leo. 1986. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
·       Copleston, Frederick. 1946. A History of Philosophy, Vol. I. NJ: Paulist Press.
·       James, William. 1902. Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion London: Longmans, Green.
·       Fowler, Harold North. 1995. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb).
·       Dover, Kenneth. 1965. “The Date of Plato’s Symposium,” in Phronesis, 10, pp. 2-20.
·       Vlasto, Gregory. 1995. Studies in Greek Philosophy, Vol. II: Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition. NJ: Princeton University Press.
·       Howland, Jacob. “Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology,” Phoenix, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Autumn, 1991), pp. 189-214.
·       Cobb, William S. 1993. Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Translated by William S. Cobb. NY: SUNY Press.



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