~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.
