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.

Birth of A Notion

Socrates only once admitted to having a teacher, that being Diotima, a woman from Mantinea and who makes a singular appearance in the Symposium, Plato’s brilliant one-act drama on the nature of Eros, or Love.

Easily one of the greatest works of literature (and philosophy, and vice versa), the Symposium is pure virtuosity. In Graduate School I had the experience, for lack of a better word, of reading this work in the original Greek with David Armstrong at The University of Texas at Austin. Armstrong was one of those old school classicists who could compose at will in Greek and Latin and was able to cast a nuance on every single word. One of the most brilliant things I read in Grad School was a piece he wrote on Greek particles. Go figure. The course culminated in one of the more bizarre experiences of my entire graduate career at Armstrong’s house with many bottles of wine and our class recreating our own Symposium (which means drinking party) and translating ad hoc the entire dialogue over the course of many, many hours and much wine. Surreal would be appropriate.

In the text, Socrates, as I say, yields for his first and only time to admitting that he “learned” something from another person, that being Diotima, and his lesson was what love was.

The set-up of the symposium itself is that there is a drinking party that Socrates gets sucked into, somewhat against his will, and at which it is decided that each participant will give a eulogy to the oft-neglected God of Love, Eros. From this round-table approach emerge some of the most famous and rehashed versions of what “love” is. This is the dialogue from which the concept of Platonic Love comes from, but what is lesser known is that was not a view that Socrates, and possible Plato himself shared, but that is neither here nor there for the present, and again, for another post, another time.

What Diotima does impart to Socrates is the concept of the partuition of ideas, meaning providing the analogy of giving birth to progeny of the mind. This has set off millennia of vapid debate as to whether Plato is trying to appropriate the one truly female experience of childbirth, and has somewhat gotten lost in that discussion rather enjoying the idea of what its worth. Nowhere does Diotima say that women can’t be pregnant with ideas, thus still having a leg up on the male half of the population, but I digress. What Diotima does encourage Socrates to do is to become a literal midwife of ideas, quite in line with Plato’s recurring theme of maieutics, or mid-wifery as being the one true profession in life, that being also what Socrates’ own mother did.

What I found most interesting in the Symposium, however, is the concept that Diotima begins with, namely that Love is neither beautiful, nor ugly. When she has led Socrates to the revelation that Love is not about the beautiful, nor about be-ing in love, then Socrates has the typical knee-jerk reaction that therefore Love must be ugly and must be about the possession of the be-loved.

In Socrates own words (albeit via Plato...enter Derrida...but I disseminate...), Diotima quickly renders this idea as mere childish reaction. Instead, she poses a question, the dialectic, the gift that she parted with to Socrates, who then imparted to those who could listen without becoming annoyed.

Why must something that is not Beautiful be Ugly? And, why must something that is not Good necessarily be Bad?

Can there not be something in between?

I “love” the Beautiful. I do. I love to look at beautiful things, at beautiful people, at beautiful sunsets, at beautiful flowers, listen to beautiful music. But, that “beautiful” for me is not Love. On the contrary, I can “love” things that are not beautiful, but perhaps are downright ugly.

What is in between?

Love, without discretion, without judgment, without prejudice, with indifference.

In essence, the definition of Love that Diotima arrives at sounds quite suspiciously like the Buddhist concept of dis-interest. This concept usually receives quite the barrage of critique, clamoring for something to hold onto, for fear of losing the beloved. “How can you love something if you don’t care for it?” people will cry. To be dis-interested is not to not care. Rather, when you love the be-loved, it is not for your gain, not for your loss. You love it because it is. Because of what it is. Because of who it is.

Socrates recount of his encounter with Diotima is ultimately interrupted by the drunken entourage of his wayward pupil Alcibiades, who abruptly changes the course of the evening with a wine-enthused eulogy of Socrates, his be-loved, leaving Love, or Eros, far behind.

When all the others have later passed out from excessive drinking long before, Socrates rises, makes a salutation to the new day, and begins it anew, seemingly unaffected by the events of the previous night’s debauchery and ribaldry, leaving us with one last thought, that like Love, perhaps there is something that is between Tragedy and Comedy, something beyond Good and Evil that is the driving force behind what will call Life. But, before he can begin that story, the last remaining symposium participant passes out, leaving us to wonder, what is the Middle Way?

Love is ...