ENGL 2013: Plato, The Symposium

Plato, The Symposium

A little background: Plato is a student of Socrates – one of the main speakers here. In all of the dialogues Plato wrote, he uses Socrates as his main speaker.

The dialogues are called dialectics. This is a formal inquiry into the truth of some question or proposition. Thus, in theory at least, in each of the dialogues or dialectics, Plato shows Socrates investigating some question – usually a moral question, though not always. In the Meno, Socrates investigates virtue, and whether it is innate or has to be taught; in Lysis, he investigates friendship. And so on.

In the Republic, which as I note above is a huge work, Plato has Socrates inquire into both the true nature of justice and how, once we understand what justice is, we might use that knowledge to create just polis – a just city-state.

Knowledge, for Plato has a specific meaning. Plato is careful to separate what he calls “true opinion” from knowledge. You only truly have knowledge, says Plato, when three things are true:

True Knowledge requires

·        The thing must be true

·        You must have good cause to believe it is true

·        You must be able to explain why it is true (that is, show me how you know it is true)

Take, thus, for instance, the fact that the world is round. Is this true? 

Why, yes it is. Do you have good cause to believe that this is true? I imagine that most of you do. 

Can you show me how you know it is true? With actual evidence, I mean? Prove to me that the world is round? 

I’m guessing that most of you can’t. (Don’t get hasty here and say you have pictures. I have pictures of Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star, after all.)

This doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the world being round. It is round, almost certainly. You just don’t have True Knowledge about its roundness. What you have is a True Opinion about its roundness.

In fact, as you will find after a little reflection, you have True Knowledge of only a very few things – how to get to Tulsa, how to make a good cream sauce, what that little binging noise in your car means. Mostly what most of us have is True Opinions about things.

Why does this matter? Because what we mostly do is move through life in a shadow world. 

In part of the Republic called the Allegory of the Cave, Plato speaks of all humanity as “strange beings” who live all of our lives like creatures at the bottom of a dark cave. We are chained in such a way that we cannot move and cannot turn out heads. All we can see is the wall of the cave straight ahead of us. Behind us, on an elevated walkway, a fire is burning. People pass along the walkway, carrying things – potted plants, shovels, statues – and those things cast shadows on the wall of the cave.

Because all we can see is those shadows, and all we can hear is the echoes of their voices as they discuss their objects, we think those shadows and those echoes are reality. Would the prisoners not talk about the shadows and sounds, Plato asks, and learn all they could about them, and discuss them learnedly, and think they were discussing reality? But all the while, they would be learning about and talking about nothing real – all their “knowledge” would be based on errors, due to their errors of perception.

Now suppose, Plato says, we could unchain some of these prisoners, and drag them out of the cave – the prisoners would struggle, and even fight us. (This is Plato’s metaphor for education.) The cave and its darkness is all they have ever known, and they would think we were trying to harm them, and this would make them angry. But suppose we persist, and drag them up out of the cave.

At first the newly freed prisoners will not be better off – the sunlight will blind them, and they will be able to see nothing.  They may even curse us for making their state worse. But little by little their eyes will adjust. First they will be able to see, for instance, a bit of shadow that reminds them of the cave; and then a reflection in a puddle that looks like a shape on the cave wall; and then maybe a tree or a river – and finally they will see the sun itself, the source of light itself (not a shadow of light, like the fire in the cave).

Now they are seeing the real world, rather than the shadows of the world, and hearing real sounds and voices, not echoes of those things.

This, Plato says, is like us. We live in a world we think is real. And yet it is only shadows and echoes of the Real world, which is elsewhere – with the One, Plato says. The One is Eternal. We know this world isn’t real, because it’s not eternal.

Love – real love, not the shadow of love – is eternal. Real beauty is Eternal. So is a Real Chair, and a Real Dog, and Real Justice. And so on. All of these things – the Forms or the Ideals – live somewhere else, with the One (also called by Plato the Good – the One or the Good seems to be Plato’s idea of God, though he never specifically makes that claim for it).

Here in the world of shadows and echoes, we mostly don’t have true knowledge – Real Knowledge. Because of that, we form our opinions and make our decisions based on shadows and echoes, instead of basing them on Real Knowledge. This, to Plato, was the source of most of the disasters and evils in the world – we think we are in the real world when, in fact, we are in the cave. We think we are acting for virtue (arête) and justice – but the things we compete for, money, power, and what we call love, are only shadows.

In the Symposium, Plato writes about his teacher, Socrates, and half a dozen of the most famous men of Athens discussing love at a drinking party.

It’s important to know that the Greeks had a number of different words for love – in English we tend to just have one. We love Mom, we love our country, we love apple pie, we love our partners, we love our kids, we love our kitties, we love our best friends.

The Greeks had separate words for many of these types of loves.

Eros: This is the love that arises between lovers, the sexual and – at least for Plato – spiritual attraction we feel for those we fall in love with.

Storge: This is love for our children, our parents, and the other members of our family. It can be very strong, and very selfless. This is also the word used by the Greeks when they talk of “loving” their generals or their rulers.

Philia: Friendship, brotherhood. This is the love between equals – Bromance. There is no sexual element in philia.

Agape: This is love like God’s love. This is the love we feel when we are loving the way God loves, a selfless love for other people, or for our country, or for all creation. It is a love that seeks no return. This was the love Plato thought we should strive for.

Note that the sort of love being discussed all through the Symposium is Eros – erotic love, the love that arises between lovers.

For Plato, as for many Athenian Greeks, the purest and best form of eros was between an older man (a man of about 25) and a younger man (an ephebe, a man who was 18-20 years old).

For many Athenian men, it was usual to delay marriage until they were at least 30 and sometimes older. Their brides were usually much younger – sixteen or seventeen. Further, Athenian women were kept secluded, only allowed out of their houses under strict supervision and with chaperones; and they were not given much education, although we know from various sources (such as vase paintings) that they could read.

This mismatch between husband and wife meant that Athenian men could not look to their wives for intellectual companionship. Nor could their wives accompany them about the city, to the theater, to the agora, to the palestra. For this, they turned to their male friends – either their philia or their male lovers.

There were also heterai – these were female lovers, paid female lovers. Diotima, whom Socrates speaks of during his speech, is a heterai. Unlike wives, heterai were highly educated, often more educated than the men who visited them.

The Symposium was written (probably) sometime around 385 BC. It is one of the more unusual works of Plato, and one of the most charming. However, though it is unusual in that it doesn’t feature – as most of his works do – a dialogue between Socrates and some hapless victim in which Socrates badgers the victim until the victim admits he has no idea what he’s talking about, it does do what most of Plato’s works do: it tries to discover true knowledge about a central concept of human existence (in this case love) and does not, quite, succeed.

Well, what is that point of that? Why spend all this time reading a work that will end with us realizing we don’t know what we thought – before we started – we did know?

Plato puts it like this: Suppose you are an engineer, and before we started talking about it, you thought you did know how to build a bridge. Now, however, you know you don’t know how to build bridges. Are you better off now, or were you better off when you still thought you knew how to build bridges?

Here in the Symposium, Plato has Socrates and several of his friends consider the question of love (eros, specifically).

They seek first to understand the “god,” though later Socrates will argue that it is not a god at all, but a “daimon,” a holy force (“daimon” is the source of our modern word “demon,” though it has come to mean something entirely different in English); and next to understand the purpose of Eros.

Phaedrus, who speaks first, skips the first steps. He spends no time defining Eros (and thus does not attempt to seek true knowledge, but relies on his opinion). Instead, he tells us what he believes the purpose of Eros is, which is to inspire virtue (arête, or excellence) in men. Because a man will want to appear excellent before his lover, he will always strive to be better, and especially to be brave in battle. This is the point of eros: to make men excellent.

Pausanius, who speaks next, makes an attempt to define Eros. His definition is more of a classification, though, and relies entirely upon mythological sources. There are two kinds of Eros – one comes from the Aphrodite that was born entirely from a male source (he is speaking of the Aphrodite created out of Uranus’s severed genitals, thrown into the sea). This is the purer form of love, which is manifested as male/male love, and specifically as m/m intellectual and spiritual love.

The second sort of Eros comes from the second Aphrodite, born of Zeus and Dione (interestingly, Dione seems to be the feminine form of the word Zeus. Make of that what you will). 

This second sort of Eros, says Pausanius, is the “more common,” by which he means the more base, form of eros. It is the erotic attraction of men for women, and men for younger boys when they just want sex with those boys, and any sort of purely physical attraction. It is also (interestingly) erotic attraction for the sake of procreation.

Aristophanes (everyone’s favorite) attempts to define Eros via a aetiological myth (one he makes up – he was a comic playwright, remember). 

He tells us that once, long ago, everyone was one of three sexes, m/m, f/f, or m/f; and we all had four legs, four arms, and two faces, as well as great round bodies and two sets of genitals. 

We ran around at great speed, and everyone was happy. But then, as with the Tower of Babel, we committed a great act of hubris, trying to scale up to the heavens and attack the Gods. So Zeus struck us with lightning, splitting us all apart. Now we all are just male, or just female.

But we rush about, Aristophanes says, hunting the other half of ourselves, and when we think we have found that other half, we throw our arms around one another and press into each other and try to become one again. And those who used to me male/male, Eros drives them to seek other men to love; and those who used to be female/female are driven to seek other women; and those who were male/female are driven to seek those of the opposite sex.

(Notice that of everyone at this Symposium only Aristophanes has a positive view of heterosexual relationships.)

Socrates is the only speak to actually try to seek a true knowledge of Eros, and he does it – as always – by getting those in the dialectic to admit that they really don’t know what they thought they knew. Here, he gets Agathon to admit that Eros is not a god at all – how could he be, since gods can’t want things/ need things/ desire things? (A god be definition must be perfect, after all.)

He also gets Agathon to agree that Eros is not just a desire, but a desire for beauty, and that beauty is the same as the good.

This bit of the argument bothers many of us, here in modern day America. The word being used for beauty here, Kallos, кàλλος, meant physical beauty, including beauty of the body, though it could also mean beautiful art or a beautiful building. 

The word being used for good, agathos, áγαθός, meant morally good, but it also meant being from a good family – being well-born, or noble. Could you be a slave, and áγαθός? Could you be base-born, and кàλλος? If you weren’t beautiful, could you be good?

These are interesting questions. Notice that in the Symposium, we are told that Socrates himself is ugly (though only externally) – Alcibiades describes him as looking like Silenus, as well as Marsyus. (Both very ugly satyrs.)

A Mask of Silenus

What Socrates seems to mean – and he absolutely seems to mean it – is that physical beauty and moral beauty are linked in some way, and that our erotic desire for physical beauty is part of our desire for moral good.

Socrates then relates to the Symposium a dialogue he once had with Diotima. Diotima, through the dialectic, gets him to admit that Eros is not a god at all, but a daimon, a power or a force which carries messages and gifts between gods and men – Eros works to help humanity with our desire.

And what do we desire? The beautiful and the good – or rather, the beautiful, because it is good, or will lead us to the good.

And why do we desire this? Because the good will make us happy.

Socrates and Diotima agree that all men always desire happiness -- and though we pursue it by many paths (making money, writing poetry, doing gymnastics) only those who seek the good, áγαθός, are true lovers, because only the good makes us happy.

Diotima also says that we want not just the good, but everlasting good – that the good must be immortal in order to be true good.

Here we might think of Plato’s allegory of the Cave – any Good which is mortal cannot be True Good. Only immortal good is true good.

Hence, Diotima says, the desire among all things to procreate. Children give us the illusion of immortality – the idea that our Good might be immortal. And hence the desire to write poetry and build cities – these, too, are images (shadows) or the true Good.

At this point, Diotima gives her famous explanation on the true purpose of eros.

In order to seek the true purpose of love, she says, we should start a boy off when he’s young. His teacher should give him first a beautiful body (somata, σώματα) to desire and admire – in other words, a young man should love an older man, a beautiful one, and should love (feel eros for him) for the beauty of his body.

From loving this specific body of this specific man, the young man will come to recognize the beauty in all bodies – to desire that beauty.

And from desiring the beauty (kallos) of their bodies (somata), he will then come to desire the greater beauty, the beauty of their souls (psyches / ψυχές).

From desiring/loving the souls of beautiful men, he will come to desire and love spiritual beauty when he sees it elsewhere in the world – in poetry, for instance, or in the laws of his city – and now he will regard desire for the physical body of one person a very minor and trivial sort of love (as adults, for instance, still may enjoy candy, but it is no longer holds the fascination it did for us as small children).

From loving spiritual things like laws and art, the man will progress even further – he will come to see that the beauty and the good (the kallos, the agathos) he sees in these individual things are really all part of one thing, which is the same thing – and that thing is true beauty, true excellence, the true Good. Unlike all the others, it is immortal and unchanging; the happiness it gives does not end or decay.

This, according to Diatima, is the purpose of Eros – to lead us ever upward, toward that immortal Good/Beauty.

At this point, Alcibiades enters the Symposium….