Dear all,
I’m very pleased to announce that my short book, Musings on Plato’s Symposium, is now available for purchase. Here’s the listing on Amazon, where it’s available for $21.99. The book will be released August 10th—that is, less than a month from now. Below, you will find an excerpt from the Preface, followed by a link to a longer preview, including the rest of the Preface and a table of contents with the titles of all 49 sections. First, though, a brief explanation.
Last Fall, I taught a seminar on the Symposium in preparation for writing an essay on Leo Strauss’s interpretation of it. As I did so, I found my understanding of the dialogue coming together in an unexpectedly clear way, thanks in no small part, of course, to Strauss’s masterful exegesis. As I jotted down my thoughts in short form, I realized that the lightness of the dialogue, its playfulness and even prankishness, invites readers into the same spirit. It thereby inclines one away from, even makes a mockery of, the conventions of scholarly writing. I decided to continue writing these notes—or, as I came to call them, musings—with an eye not to scholarly convention but to my own enjoyment and, should I ever publish them, that of readers similarly disposed.
I wrote and polished these musings between October of last year and February of the present one. The result was a holistic interpretation of the dialogue presented in, as mentioned, 49 aphoristic meditations on its various parts, which the fine folks at Political Animal Press agreed to publish, despite its unconventional style—for which I am extremely grateful.
I very much enjoyed writing this little book, and I hope you enjoy reading it, as well.
Cheers,
Alex
Preface
This book is decidedly not a work of scholarship, stubbornly not. It offers a holistic interpretation of Plato’s Symposium, as is conventional among scholarly books, but departs by presenting it as a series of musings, beginning with the puzzles of the dialogue’s various parts, long perplexing to me, and ascending therefrom in the direction of the whole. I have chosen this style because I am interested not so much in speaking to scholars as I am in guiding those similarly perplexed, those whose questions come from within and whose paths are their own, rather than those who take their bearings by the community of the learned, with their pre-existing concerns and themes. To such readers, then, for whom love has become a deep, personal problem, who are drawn therefore to the Symposium and enthusiastic for distilled reflections on this or that passage, distilled and for that reason, I hope, also thought-provoking—to them do I offer this little book. I have therefore written each section, so that it will be largely intelligible when read alone. Readers curious, however, about how the Symposium fits together as a whole would profit most by reading more or less straight through.
Such departures from scholarly convention occur much too rarely. Every act of interpretation, when so much as spoken, still worse when published, is something of a betrayal. For to say what an author has left unsaid is an indecent act of public stripping. Often an author is silent out of ignorance; in such cases, the exposure of his illness or deformity is justifiable at least in the name of public health. But when he has good reasons for not speaking, when he does so to make the reader complicit in the act of thinking, then to say aloud what he has passed over in pregnant silence is an offense not just to common decency but still worse to philosophy. It is a congenital defect of the scholar that he considers it his professional duty to expose; his unscrupulousness in adducing evidence for what he has exposed even makes one shudder. Or it would, were his methods not de arte ill-suited to the mode of writing employed by the philosophers, for rarely, all too rarely, does the scholar rise to the occasion and meet the philosopher on an equal plane. Nevertheless, practically speaking, such rare moments do nothing to alleviate the general tendency of the scholar, who in demanding that the philosophers’ reasons be laid bare demands that his fellow scholars do the same, even more so. Whence the constant nods to the literature, the innumerable footnotes, the mile-long bibliographies. Whence also my stubbornness. Were this a book on Kant, I would be far more amenable to the demands of the scholar, close as they are to the philosopher’s own mode and tendency. But in the case of Plato, such demands would be a cold shower, meant to bring you to your senses and cure you of the playful questioning, without which Plato refuses to let himself be stripped. And his Symposium? Two minutes at a “symposium” of scholars, with their PowerPoints and projectors, their handouts and convention centers, more than suffice to demonstrate how poorly their training prepares them to understand the amiable air and erotic fireworks at Agathon’s house, to say nothing of Plato’s strange mixture of the playful, prankish, flirtatious, outrageous, and beyond. It is obscene to unclasp a woman’s bra in public; to fumble at it ineptly is a double shame, to pursuer and pursued alike.
Continue reading the Preface here, with additional front matter. Or purchase the book here.
P.S. For more on the Symposium, check out my earlier post of a talk I gave on Plato’s Symposium for the ACTC earlier this year—it touches on a number of the same points, though it’s really only a small part of the full interpretation. Here are direct links to the talk and the question and answer period.
I should also clarify that I have taken down my essay on Strauss on the Symposium, since it was potentially a problem vis-à-vis publication.