Praising Love, and More
Four Selections from "Musings on Plato's Symposium"
Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and in celebration I thought I’d send out a post of four sections from Musings on Plato’s Symposium, my book of 49 aphorisms on Plato’s celebrated work on love. If you’re looking to get your beloved something beautiful, consider picking up a copy today.1 You can also read the table of contents and “Preface” here.
The selections I’ve chosen focus on why we find it difficult to praise love in a simple or straightforward manner (§8); on how the comic poet Aristophanes’ famous speech is, against our initial impression, deeply tragic (§19), on Diotima’s presentation of love as a combination of seeing and being-with or holding and beholding (§38); and finally on the meaning of “inside” and “outside” that runs through the dialogue and to what sort of beauties it directs us (§48).
Be fruitful and multiply,
Alex
Engraving of Plato’s Symposium by Pietro Testa (1611–1650).
8. Praising Love
The group assigns itself the task of praising love, a task that no poet thus far has ever assumed for himself. Strange to think, too, considering how many of our songs, our movies, both tragic and comic, how many of our novels and poems have as their theme love. But a quick glance at any one of these suffices to show how we really view love. How many of these novels and poems are about love lost, about the often-insurmountable obstacles to attaining the goods love promises? We can pass over the tragedies readily, as their genre alone betrays the conclusions their authors draw. And though we appear saved from the tragic view by the genre of romantic comedies, which do in the end tend to praise love, still they only ever do so in the end, that is, by relying on the familiar trope of love found, love lost or jeopardized, then love regained—they succeed, that is, only by acknowledging and incorporating the problems of love. Much stranger it seems, then, that the group decides to praise it! So, is there not every danger that they will ignore the great risks that come with love? At the very least, their efforts might and indeed do aid in clarifying the critique of love, they force its critics to state with greater clarity what had until this point remained, for the most part, only implicit in the plots of the poets—they force a philosophic critique of the power and effect of erōs on the human soul.
19. The Tragedy of Aristophanes
I agree with the conclusion many others have drawn about Aristophanes’ speech, that it’s essentially tragic. Is there really another half somewhere out there, waiting to complete me? And even if there is, how can I know that she, to whom I cleave, truly is that half? And even if she truly is, how could I ever achieve the desired unity? And even if I somehow achieved that unity, even if Hephaestus did come down and actually fulfilled his offer to weld me to her, would I be happy? Would I even be? Is that what my love amounts to, a desire to cease to be? Do I really love out of a sense of incompleteness, out of yearning to escape my poor, sad, fragmentary self? And what about her? Does she, in turn, love me for these very same reasons? But how could she love me? How could I love her? How could anyone love a lover, a broken fragment of a being? What, then, do we really love when we “love” another?
Plato puts a tragic account of love in the mouth of a comic poet, of the comic poet, Aristophanes, as it very much suits Plato’s sense of humor to make a tragic figure of the comic poet.—Let’s not discount Aristophanes so quickly, now. Is he so unaware of this joke, of the tragic implications of his speech? He surely tries to make it funny, but the jokes are all superficial, superficial because mere images, likenesses floating on the surface of the tale to conceal its tragic implications. And they conceal those implications by translating the most troubling details into the lowly and ridiculous: the circle-people roll, “just like” tumbling acrobats; they are spherical, “similar” to their planetary parents, and cut in half, “just like” eggs and apples; they generate children in the ground, “just like” cicadas, rather than the male in the female, as now; and we today might still be cut in half again, “just like” dice, so that we would look “just like” stone reliefs. From what do these comic images distract? From our original arrogance, our lost wholeness, and our present incompleteness, from the sad fact that reproduction is a poor palliative against the ills of our present condition, from the suspicion that our original arrogance may not have departed us…—But what of the circle-people themselves? Are they not comic yet presented literally? Or should we not ask of what are they an image? Here’s one important possibility. The navel, Aristophanes says, is Apollo’s reminder to us of our ancient nature. But does anyone look at his navel and think of being a circle-person? No, or rather not unless the original circle-people are a comic image for our pregnant mothers. But then for what would our longing be?
Not every good is devoid of beauty, is it? Nature does supply, after all, lovely olive groves, beside which one might gather with friends and converse.
38. Holding and Beholding
Is Diotima’s “ladder of love” even a ladder of love? She speaks of love in the first three of its six steps, only to replace it with verbs of vision and coupling, “seeing and being-with.” But what is this formula but an articulation, an analysis, of the aspects of love? What do lovers do but hold and behold one another?—Can one really do both, though? When lovers embrace, the chin of each rests on the other’s shoulder. What do they see? Not one another. Don’t they close their eyes? And when they withdraw somewhat and look into each other’s eyes, are they holding one another, or are they not at a distance?—Sight and possession, holding and beholding, these two sides to love are not easily reconciled, they are rather in essential tension with one another, but since sight takes priority—Diotima often uses verbs of sight without “being-with”—is possession even possible at the highest level? Can the beautiful itself, the peak of this ladder of “love,” really become mine? That would be to defile it, to violate its purity—
48. Inside and Outside
We’re about to leave the Symposium, to venture outside its bounds, so here is as good a place as any to say a thing or two about the repeated motif of inside vs. outside [that runs throughout the dialogue]. What happens inside? Agathon’s charming dinner, the praises of erōs, and Alcibiades’ praise of Socrates, as well as the celebration of the birth of Aphrodite, Alcibiades’ attempt to seduce Socrates, and the blissful slumber of the leading lights of Athens and the late-come revelers. And what happens outside? Poverty’s intercourse with Plenty and Socrates at war, but above all the silent meditation of Socrates on the porch of Agathon’s neighbor. Socrates came inside on his own terms, and rather disruptively. In his reluctance to enter, he is the very opposite of Alcibiades and, later, the revelers, eager to be a part of the festivities at Agathon’s house. The gathering finally devolves into a Bacchic revelry, a literal intoxication following the metaphoric intoxication of the speeches that preceded it. “Inside” seems, in this text, to represent intoxication with the beautiful, while “outside” seems to represent love of the good things. Or perhaps it stands rather for the limits that the necessary places on the beautiful and, consequently, the modesty of the good things, the homely and not-so-sexy goods available to us. For not every good is devoid of beauty, is it? Nature does supply, after all, lovely olive groves, beside which one might gather with friends and converse.
Thanks for reading! Please share far and wide.
Caution: within a few weeks of this book’s release, my wife filed for divorce. Conjunction ≠ causation, but I have my suspicions.