Thoughts on Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus

My latest dialogue is Plato’s Symposium. I once again read the Oxford World Classics edition. I like these editions and their notes, but the introductions for the shorter dialogues are ridiculously long. This one feels longer than the actual dialogue itself. I’m pretty sure they make the intros for the short dialogues super long just so they end up with something that’s actually book sized. In this case, the introduction does have some useful material, because symposium is culturally very weird to anyone reading it probably anywhere in the modern world due to the way Greek’s practiced homosexuality. Apparently, basically everything we know about Greek homosexuality comes from the book by that name of Kenneth Dover, which the introduction heavily references. According to the book, Greek men would take adolescent male lovers, with whom they also would have a mentoring relationship.

The adolescents were expected to stop being receptive sexual partners upon reaching manhood or face public ridicule. The translator argues persuasively that high class Athenian men are going to have to have sex with someone (male sexual desire being what it is), but since women are so cloistered and unavailable, Greek homosexuality was the result that we got. The men were still expected to marry and have children, although I know Sparta had major issues with birth rates, and Athens might have a swell.

I haven’t read Kenneth Dover’s book, but as a threshold matter I don’t buy the notion that receptive homosexual behavior ended at manhood like I’ve read in the introduction to Symposium and elsewhere. It may be that Kenneth Dover hedges that claim and explores it in more detail in the actual book, but reading it is outside of my scope. Socrates is well known for wanting to sit next to the best looking man (not teen) at these dialogues. The men (not teens) in Symposium are sharing couches and clearly flirting with each other. Alcibiades shows up and talks about how Socrates wouldn’t have sex with him, and I get no impression that he’s talking only about when he was a teenager. My distinct impression is that homosexual receptive activity continued and was tolerated in adult males as well, which is fine, but I’d like to see someone in this field explain how to reconcile the text of Symposium with the claim that such activity doesn't continue into adulthood.

To Robin Waterfield’s credit, the introduction is upfront about the cultural difficulties that Symposium poses, when it would probably be easier and more politically correct to gloss over them or at least approach them in a different way. The fact is though—what we’re talking about here is an older man telling a thirteen year old boy, “I’m going to teach you all about the Iliad and how to be a man—but first I’m going to play with your balls and you’re going to give me a blowjob.” It’s weird to us, and it’s weird almost no matter whether you are religious or whatever your political leanings might be. In part this is because of our (maybe not correctly named) notion of Platonic love, where sexual desire and “higher” things like teaching are separated. The Greeks saw no need for this separation, and there really is no objective need. But the dialogue is primarily and in its original context about this type of man-teen boy love. Yes, it’s applicable to all kinds of love, and yes, not every speaker in it talks just about homosexual love. All of this paragraph, by the way, is stuff the intro points out and not just stuff I came up with on my own. The introduction is where it’s pointed out that “eros” is translated as love, but it really is something more like sexual desire, craving, and love all wrapped up together.

On to the dialogue itself. Symposium is enjoyable and highly popular, probably because it’s fun, readable, and includes fantastic and dramatic larger than life characters like the infamous Alcibiades—a guy whose life is so crazy that if it was a work of fiction, you’d find it to implausible. I am not convinced that it has as much philosophical or intellectual value as to be considered amongst Plato’s most important works (which it apparently is).

Aristophanes has this really bizarre speech where he basically says that human beings used to be essentially hermaphrodites with two sets of genitals and two sets of limbs who were split apart by the gods, and ever since then we search for the other half that we lack. I do like the idea that in searching for love we are literally searching for our other half, for something that we lack. Aristophanes also has a nice description of falling in love where it’s not just lust or desire but this unexplainable feeling of just wanting to be with the other person all the time. He also says that love is just the name we give to the desire for and pursuit of wholeness, and that we’d be physically joined to the object of our love if we could be.

I also liked this apparently oft quoted bit from Socreates’ speech: “The proper way to go about or be guided through the ways of love is to start with beautiful things in this world and always make the beauty I’ve been talking about the reason for your ascent. You should use the things of this world as rungs in a ladder. You start by loving one attractive body and step up to two; from there you move on to physical beauty in general, from there to the beauty of people’s activities, from there to the beauty of intellectual endeavours, and from there you ascend to that final intellectual endeavour, which is no more and no less than the study of that beauty, so that you finally recognize true beauty.” (ie the Form of beauty).

‘“What else could make life worth living, my dear Socrates,” the woman from Mantinea said, “than seeing true beauty?”

I do like this idea, but it’s culturally odd that getting there is tied up in the context of sex with young boys. I can much more easily see this ladder idea in art (which Plato doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of) or love within a marriage or for a child. Another one I liked was this: “I try to win others as well round to the view that, in the business of acquiring immortality, it would be hard for human nature to find a better partner than love.” That is, love allows us to transcend to forms/beyond/the divine. This is the central message of the dialogue, and it’s a powerful and meaningful one regardless of the cultural context.

The appearance by Alcibiades, who forces everyone at the drinking party to start drinking much more heavily, is also a highly entertaining highlight.

I also read Phaedrus, which I didn't find really required its own entry. It has a similar theme and tackles similar issues to Symposium, and has similar culture weirdness since it's about man-boy love. I do like the idea that love is a kind of madness that draws you closer to the divine or the absolute that is expressed in this one. It's also a pretty fun, light read, but I don't know that it needs to be included amongst Plato's most important works. Here is a great quote about the nature of the divine from Phaedrus:

"The region beyond heaven has never yet been adequately described in any of our earthly poets' compositions, nor will it ever be. But since one has to make a courageous attempt to speak the truth, especially when it is truth that one is speaking about, here is a description. This region is filled with true being. True being has no color or form; it is intangible, and visible only to intelligence, the soul's guide. True being is the province of everything that counts as true knowledge. So since the mind of god is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge (as is the mind of every soul which is concerned to receive it's proper food), it is pleased to be at last in a position to see true being, and in gazing on the truth it is fed and feels comfortable, until the revolution carries it around to the same place again. In the course of its circuit it observes justice as it really is, self-control, knowledge - not the kind of knowledge that is involved with change and differs according to which of the various existing things (to use the term 'existence' in its everyday sense) it makes it's object, but the kind of knowledge whose object is things as they really are. And once it has feasted it's gaze in the same way on everything else that really is, it sinks back into the inside of heaven and returns home."