Adventure classics – What’s love got to do with it?

The Symposium, by Plato

commentary from Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

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It’s Socrates’ turn at last to speak on the agreed topic, the nature of love, at what would be the world’s most famous party, as Plato describes in his Symposium. (Will knowing that “symposium” was originally simply a term for a drinking party make any of us look forward more to events labeled with this title at conferences?)

The speaker immediately before Socrates, the poet Agathon, who was also the party’s host, fears his speech will seem ridiculous once a thinker as great as Socrates speaks. But Socrates remains true to his often-stated premise that he is the most ignorant of human beings and modestly (or ironically) puts the authorship of his story on a woman, the priestess Diotima. She was, he says, “my instructress in the art of love.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, notes that there is no evidence outside of The Symposium for any female religious authority named Diotima, although some writers have speculated that she may be based on the historical figure of Aspasia, a brilliant prostitute who participated in the intellectual circles of Athens.

With this possibility in mind, are the other guests preparing themselves for something racy from Socrates? In fact, in a version of The Symposium from Xenophon, another of Socrates’ disciples, the old philosopher does come across as rather naughty.

In Plato’s version, however, the surprise is the way Diotima upends Socrates’ ideas about the nature of love as neatly as he has done to the claims of the previous speakers. Love, she says, is not a god at all, but a spirit who mediates between gods and mortals, “spanning the chasm which divides them.”

Sexual intercourse and procreation are divinely ordained aspects of love, Diotima tells Socrates. This form of love leads to the desire to possess an individual beloved and to generate beautiful children. But the lover who progresses in knowledge will realize “that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form…(until) drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts.”

It was the version of love that Plato plainly saw for himself. But even that was not to be the last word on the subject.

Socrates has barely finished speaking when “suddenly there was a great knocking at the door of the house, as of revelers” When the door is answered, in bursts the baddest of Athenian bad boys, the beautiful, brilliant, rich, well-born and charismatic young man Alcibiades, who would go on to betray Athens to its enemy Sparta, then Sparta to Athens, then both city states to their archenemies, the Persians, before dying in exile at the hands of assassins.

It was this horrific behavior of a man who had been one of Socrates’ followers that helped inspire the charges of “corruption of the young” against him and lead to his execution. In effect, Goldberger writes, “Alcibiades’ love for Socrates was sterile. Nothing creative or beautiful ever came of it.” Instead, Plato formed himself into the “thought” child of Socrates. “To love Socrates (as Plato did) is to have been impregnated with his intuitions.”

But even Plato, claiming the crown of favorite child for himself, can’t resist the erotic energy Alcibiades brings with him when he bursts into Agathon’s house (or rather staggers, as in the illustration to this post). Although uninvited, the other partygoers beg him to join them. And although the drinking had been moderate up to this point, Alcibiades drunkenly insists on having the others drink deep to his transient, tragic Dionysian splendor.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie’s memoir of her life in archeology, Come Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics – The party's topic was love, sweet love

The Symposium
by Plato

***

Last Friday’s post about the world-famous drinking party Plato re-created in The Symposium left readers in doubt about the actual drinking going on. Although accounts differ, however, initially the guests decide to drink lightly, in consequence of several of them still being hung over from the previous night’s partying. So here we are at an all-male party and with little wine and no women, even the flute girl having been dismissed for the meantime. How will the guests entertain themselves? If you guessed, turn on ESPN for the latest sports, sorry, wrong era. In 4^th century BCE Greece, however, instead of watching football, the guests vote to tell stories. And the topic for the evening is love.

As I’ve mentioned before, Plato wasn’t the only ancient Greek writing memoirs about his mentor, the fourth century BCE philosopher Socrates. His contemporary Xenophon also wrote a Symposium, in a somewhat naughtier vein. Plato’s, you might suppose, would be more serious. And it is. Except when he puts comedy playwright Aristophanes onstage with the strangest story about the origins of love ever imagined and makes me wonder whether it might have been Plato who actually wrote the fantastic story he put into Aristophanes’ mouth.

(Not that Aristophanes needs much help writing stories. His Lysistrata is still inspirational after more than 2,000 years, as witness its newest incarnation in Spike Lee’s current Chi-Raq satire.)

As each guest’s turn at storytelling goes round the table, Aristophanes’ turn comes early. But he begs off, claiming to be incapacitated by a bout of hiccoughs. Maybe he really is hiccoughing badly. Or perhaps, given the ancient Greek reliance on physical comedy, Plato is caricaturing the playwright as Aristophanes had caricatured the chief guest, Socrates, in his plays. Or since Socrates was among the guests still waiting to speak, perhaps Aristophanes just wanted time to think of an extra special story to tell.

After a few more guests have had their say, Aristophanes declares himself cured of his hiccoughs and begins to treat of, as he says, the original nature of man, when “The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two…(this) primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways…and the remainder to correspond.”

These original beings could move by walking upright, but they also had the ability to roll when they wanted to move especially fast. And they were very strong, so strong that they attacked the gods.

At first the gods wanted to destroy them, but realized that would leave no one to sacrifice to them. Instead, they settled on cutting each human into two pieces, to weaken them. The result was that each half-person spent his (or her) life seeking its other half.

“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself,” Aristophanes says, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy…and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love…And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments.”

And perhaps Socrates, who has yet to speak, says to himself, wow, how am I going to top that one?

Which leaves Adventure classics waiting until next Friday to finish this December of spirited adventures with Socrates’ story and what came after. And wondering at the camaraderie between the playwright and the philosopher he could caricature so viciously in his plays. One of Socrates’ friends, a guest who has yet to enter, will make just that point. And others, even Plato among them, will lay some of the blame for Socrates’ execution at the playwright’s feet.

Adventure classics – The unseen guest at the party

The Symposium, by Plato

With commentary from Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Goldstein

***

Considering that Socrates never wrote down a word about his life’s work as a philosopher, I have to wonder how he would have made of the virtual genre that writing about him would become after his death. Among other scribblers, two of his greatest students, Plato and the soldier-historian Xenophon, would each write an account of the famous party that is the subject of The Symposium. Although Xenophon, like Plato, would have been far too young to have attended such a stag drinking party in circa 422 BCE, Xenophon wrote himself into his version of the event. Plato did not. And yet, if not for Plato's re-creation of the event, readers might never have heard of it. He was the unseen, unguessed-at guest at the world’s most famous party.

So who was Plato? For a thinker and writer whose works laid the foundation for the discipline of philosophy, still being read nearly 2,400 after his death, strangely little is known about his life. He actually expressed reluctance even to write, worrying that writing things down would take the place of actual learning.

Even his name has been in doubt, with one biographer asserting that the philosopher had actually been named Aristocles and that Plato, meaning “broad” was a nickname bestowed either because of his muscular physique (he had apparently considered becoming a professional wrestler in his youth) or from other physical or intellectual qualities.

Still another biographer wrote that Plato originally hoped for a career as a playwright. (For this biographical information, I am indebted to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s very accessible discussion in Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.)

All biographers agree, however, that any thought of careers either in athletics or drama flew out the window once Plato, as a young man, fell under the influence of Socrates. The older man’s execution by Athenians in agony over their city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars forever scarred Plato.

As Goldstein writes, “Socrates’ fate at the hands of the democracy – his death sentence, like the guilty verdict, was the result of popular vote – might have had as much to do with (Plato’s) dim view of humanity as it did with his turning to philosophy in the first place. . . Because there had been such a man as Socrates, Plato could convince himself that human life was worth caring about. But I suspect that for him it did take convincing.”

It was through the dramatic structure of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates or at least his understanding of Socrates, played a part, that he wrestled intellectually and emotionally with the conflict between the good and evil in human beings, and in all of creation.

And because Socrates had loved to converse with people in all walks of life, Plato’s dialogues are for the most part taken from scenes of daily life and often peopled with historical characters. Instead of writing plays about gods and ancient heroes, Plato would, effectively, write plays in dialogue between real people set in their everyday world.

To illustrate the effect Plato’s settings, mundane for their time, Goldstein alternates his discussion of Plato’s place in philosophy with Platonically-influenced dialogues set in our time, such as “Plato at the 92^nd Street Y,” Plato as an advice columnist’s consultant, as a guest on a cable news network and, yes, on a book tour at Google Inc.’s corporate headquarters. It’s a visit that afterward still gives “media escort” Cheryl fits as she relates her experience with this very strange author Plato and with the questions his questions raised, to her friend over a few Long Island Iced Teas.

(And speaking of iced teas, last Friday’s discussion of The Symposium broke off as the guests at that long-ago party were discussing their alcoholic intake. Next Friday, Adventure classics will return to the party to hear the rest of the discussion, including an inspiredly goofy allegory of love by one of its guests.)

Adventure classics: A famous party & its very odd guest

The Symposium

by Plato

***

It was the world’s most famous drinking party but the guest of honor almost didn’t show up. Then, after religious ceremonies perhaps intended to placate whichever gods were in charge of hangover remedies, the guests decide after all that they were still feeling the effects of the previous night’s heavy drinking. They vote to send the hired musician home and decide to do more talking than drinking. Even so, some of them manage to pass out and have to sleep it off at their host’s home. Years afterward, a friend of the tardy guest decides to write a play about the whole thing, employing a great deal of his very active imagination.

For somebody like me, whose public school knowledge of Socrates was of a wise old man bravely facing his tragic death, the notion of Socrates as self-deprecatingly funny was a startling revelation.

Socrates’ death had in fact had a profound effect on his young friend and student Plato, who was in his twenties at the time, nearly 50 years Socrates’ junior. And yes, it was Plato who wrote the most moving account of his friend’s death which turned him away forever from the political career his family dreamed of for him. And yet, the Socrates Plato brought back to life in The Symposium radiates the joy of living.

Set in approximately 422 BC (when Plato himself was only a small child), The Symposium opens with a pair of friends chatting about the party one of them attended years before at which the guests spend the night talking about love. In a friend of a friend frame the narrator states that the one he heard the story from, Aristodemus, claimed to have met Socrates one day freshly bathed and actually wearing shoes (or at any rate, sandals), which particularly caught his attention because the philosopher more commonly went around barefoot.

The reason for being so dressed up, Socrates tells him, is that he is on his way to a party at the home of a rich friend. And by the way, Aristodemus, how about coming along too?

Slightly nonplussed by the thought of showing up to a party uninvited, Aristodemus at first demurs. But at Socrates’ insistence, he decides to put the burden of explaining his presence on Socrates himself: “I shall say that I was bidden of you, and you will have to make an excuse.”

However, when Aristodemus arrives at the house of the party’s host, Agathon, he finds that Socrates has been struck by some philosophic thought and has dropped behind out of sight.

A search ensues, Socrates is discovered in the portico of a neighboring house and refuses to stir. “Let him alone,” Aristodemus says. “He has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason.”

Halfway through supper, Socrates reappears. His friends are only too well acquainted with his idiosyncrasies, and have decided to begin eating without him. And although Agathon might have grounds to be offended by his guest’s behavior, he only teases him gently to share the “wise thought which came into your mind. . . and is now in your possession."

But first, of course, there is the important matter of drinking to consider.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of spiritual adventures with Plato’s Symposium. That the illustration for today’s post is taken from Anselm Feuerbach’s 1869 painting of the scene, whose significance philosophy professor J.H. Lesher explains.)

Wordcraft -- Storytelling, write or wrong

The headline of a recent article in the opinion section of the Dallas Morning News caught my attention: “The moral of the story -- Does literature make us more virtuous? Evidence is scant.”

“You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us,” writes Gregory Currie, whose biography listed him as a professor of philosophy. “Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?”

As a writer of sometimes gory fiction, I’m inclined to agree that reading about adultery and suicide, maybe even the evocative scent of madeleines, to pick a few topics from Currie’s list, can expand readers’ imaginations. And I’m generally in favor of expanding imaginations, although recent discussions with my seven-year-old grandsons convince me their imaginations have already expanded to universe-engulfing dimensions.

How about literature as a refiner of social sensibilities? Sounds good, although I’m not sure what literary work would alert the boys to the social insensibility of pointing out that I’m old, a fact I’m already only too aware of.

It’s the idea that literature’s role should involve the refining of moral sensibilities that bothers me. Or that, if it doesn’t improve our morals, it has no intrinsic value and no claim on our attention.

Not that it’s Currie making such a demand, he assures us. Instead, he uses it to undercut the argument he attributes to others of pushing fiction as an arbiter of morality. Proclaiming himself an anti-elitist, he holds that fiction’s only benefit is aesthetic. He hints, as the greater philosopher Plato did, that literature can’t be trusted to be moral, and therefore has no grounds for its existence other than the questionable one of aesthetics.

Although Plato’s discussion in his Republic makes it clear that his beef was with storytelling as such, the term he used for literature is usually translated “poetry” -- the way people recorded fictional stories for most of human history, and probably, prehistory. Prose fiction is a relatively recent introduction. Plato, of course, wasn’t above using the aesthetic devices of fiction to make many of his own works delightful.

The assumption both by Currie and those he says he criticizes -- that morality, even in its smallest details, only comes in one size and style -- is the one that most bothers me. But if literature -- if storytelling -- isn’t a source of moral arbitration, what is it good for? If its only value is aesthetic, how does it differ from, or claim superiority, to any other aesthetic practice -- say cooking or knitting -- which at any rate have obvious utilitarian benefits as well? Why write literature, read it, urge it on our loved ones?

I’ll let another author speak to that. “Every story worth telling in some way mirrors our lives,” writes David Corbett, who specializes in crime fiction, in his introduction to The Art of Character. “It can’t provide scientific certainty and it shouldn’t try. . . It remains rooted far more in searching than in finding, more wedded to the hypothetical ‘what if’ than any conclusive QED.”

To some extent, Currie agrees -- after all, how would we even quantify the effect of reading great books on morality?

“I have never been persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in an elite,” Currie writes. But “advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes don’t overrate the evidence -- they don’t even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is.”

I’ll quote Corbett again for an answer. “As long as we’re alive, the questions of who we are and how we should live remains open. No one convinces us less than the person who crows, ‘I have the answer.’ And ironically, this is precisely why fiction provides a more satisfying depiction of human life than any scientific or otherwise theoretical rendering can offer.”

It was just this modeling of real life instead of theoretical concepts that caused Plato to condemn storytelling. Theoretical concepts are clean. Real life is messy. Even Plato might have itched at the irony of becoming a revered literary figure through the influence of his fictionalized dialogues, based on real life of his beloved friend Socrates, his students, his enemies, instead of through the often pompous arguments of The Republic.

(For more about Corbett and his writing, see www.davidcorbett.com/. For the complete text of Currie’s article, see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/.)