Like Father, Like Son, or Like Mother, Like Son?

Recently I walked through Middelheim, the outdoor sculpture "museum" of Antwerp, Belgium, where I live. Middelheim is a beautifully landscaped grounds with sculptures dotting the pathways, sometimes even hidden amongst the trees, and only the discerning eye will catch all of them. It boasts of ranging from Rodin to the modern day, which it does deliver, and one could spend hours and hours wandering through the pathways, encountering various styles, manners, and media of sculptures. My daughter remarked that they were all naked as well when they were images of humans.

Some are in a very Neo-classical style, which made me think of how statues have been such a fixture in our society, especially those of human images. It is almost as if this is a way for us to freeze a moment or emotion in Time, trying to salvage it from the ever-changing world.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, so far as we know, since Socrates himself never left us an autobiography, so we have to rely upon the few sources we have, most prominently, of course, being Plato.

However, that got me to thinking about the curious mixture of parental occupations and how one could (and I am merely playing a thought experiment here, nothing more...) imagine how each of them influenced his later Philosophy, and what an impact this has had on Philosophy ever since. For, it is a marriage of opposites, or perhaps it is a paradox, which Socrates was so found of using for examples.

A stonemason, if he does sculpt a statue of a human, is a Reductionist by nature and takes the material at hand and removes the outer husk of appearance to "find the reality" or "essence" of the Form inside. I believe it was Michelangelo who said that he always attempted to "free" the figure from the marble block, its silent tomb and to bring it to life. But, the life that even such a Master as Michelangelo was, can only bring a suggestion of life. This of course gives rise to the mythology of the likes of Pygmalion, the attempt to bring the inanimate to the animate world.

On the other hand, a midwife, such as Socrates' mother, brought the animate into the animate world. And, unlike a stone cutter, who chips away, the midwife is the conduit of that which is growing, not reducing.

Being raised by such parents, it is no wonder that a young Socrates might be curious as to the process of the Permanent and Impermanent, the Animate and the Inanimate, and the concepts of the Image versus Reality.

Unlike the Romantic version of the statues of Antiquity being ivory white statues with no eyes and stoic countenances, the statues of Socrates time were actually at the time painted with eyes and garments, and were more rather like Madame Tussauds House of Wax than the ghostly figures we see in the British Museum, or in Greece or Italy. They were more attempts to look human than not.

Socrates is often criticized, via Plato, as expounding upon the idea that men can be "pregnant" with an Idea, and that a Philosopher is merely a midwife for bringing such an idea to the world. This he learned from the initiated teachings of the only teacher Socrates ever mentions, a woman named Diotima in the Symposium.

Well, is that such a horrible thought? Does it have to be sexist? Pre-gnant, merely means, pre-- before and gnant--which comes from the root of "gen" which is to be born, or simply, coming into existence. So, a Pre-gnant Idea, is merely one that has not yet come to fruition, has not yet been delivered from its source. It is likewise, the block of marble without the sculptor's hand having "freed" the figure within.

Maybe we can imagine a young Socrates idly sitting by thinking about the two professions of his parents, the wheels beginning to turn, and instead of championing one or the other, he actually tried to fuse the two together, finding, like the connection between pleasure and pain, life and death, and being and not-being, where there was a common ground, an Idea, whose Time had come.

Perhaps...

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 ...