Symposium

The final correspondence I had with a former student recently who died a tragic death, was the question of which definition of Love from the Symposium was the best one, or the correct one?

When Joshua asked me this, I replied that there cannot be an extraction of one definition of Love from the Symposium, but rather all of the definitions make up the composition of Love, as a whole, seen from many perspectives. In a pseudo-Socratic dismissal, I refused to say that I knew the answer, for I don’t. I believe that to define Love is to kill it, in a very Taoist sense.

Plato was not afraid to tackle the big questions, and in Joyce’s words, to take on “those words we fear the most,” such as Love, Death, the Soul, Beauty, Truth, Justice and so forth. However, Plato was also circumspective enough to have a very dismissive Socrates as his mouthpiece, one who claimed to only know that he knew no-thing.

What runs throughout the works of Plato is the careful attention to words and their ascribed meanings. In the Greek, it is very apparent, and in all honesty, most philosophical discussions fail to go back to the Greek at times, and to the drama and the literary nature of Plato, the Symposium being one of the greatest one-act plays ever written, aside from its philosophical nature. It was a drama, a drama about Love, and our inability to really know what that is for the most part. Though maligned at times by “real philosophers,” such literary critic/philosophers such as Derrida and Kristeva always went back to the Greek, to the words, and looked for the relations therein.

For me, the question of Love, goes back also to the myth of Er from Plato’s magnum opus, The Republic, which recounts a trip to the Afterlife and back, and the ultimate forgetting of the Soul of such journeys, leaving us to wonder and wander through a dark wood during the dark nights of the Soul. However, for me, what I think of is the root of Er, which also goes back to the Sanskrit or Rh, which ultimately means, to flow.

From Er, you obtain two derivatives, the o-base Eros, Love, and the i-base, Eris, or Strife. I cannot help to think that Eros and Eris are related and are communal, two faces to the same coin. That with Love there is Strife, and vice versa.

From the Symposium, we glean several definitions of “Love” that permeate our modern-day parlance, such as the separation of the Soul’s Mates, the unrequited Love from the Beloved, Platonic Love, and the Spiritual Love of the Divine, not to mention carnal desires.

The Symposium runs the gamut of Love, resulting in a riotous drunken revelry, leaving us with the image of Socrates walking away, after the last symposer has passed out from too much wine, to face a new day, paying homage to the sun, in a salutation, and carrying on with life, as we all must do in the face of adversity.