Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 031 - Wings of Desire - Plato's Erotic Dialogues.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Wings of Desire, Plato's Erotic Dialogues. The past, as they say, is a foreign country. And ancient Greece can often seem to be a very foreign country indeed. Some aspects of Greek culture do find echoes in our own, even if the echoes are distant ones. There aren't really any sophists nowadays, but there are spin doctors. The Presocratics did Philosophy of Nature and we do science. Euripidean tragedy and Aristophanic comedy are very distant ancestors of modern theatre, and so on. In this episode though, I'll be looking at Plato's reaction to a Greek cultural practice that really has no parallel in our own, pederasty. Nowadays, sexual liaisons between adult men and young boys are not merely illegal, but among the most repugnant moral crimes that can be committed. But in ancient Greece, such liaisons played an accepted role in civil life. These pederastic relationships were seen as a way of educating young men in the ways of the polis. And I do mean young men, boys really. Ideally, the younger partner would be in the bloom of youth, before the first growth of their beard. This boy was called the beloved, while the lover was the older man. Notice the implication that the attraction was not necessarily mutual. It was assumed that the older lover would take physical pleasure in their partnering, whereas the boy would not. Boys who seemed to enjoy this side of the relationship were considered shameless, and a beloved youngster was supposed to show his decency by playing hard to get before finally giving in to the blandishments of the lover. Now I know what you're thinking. What's in it for the boy if he isn't expected to get any physical pleasure out of it? Of course, at the stage of courtship there's the pleasure of being flattered and pursued, something Plato exploits for humorous effect in several dialogues. Remember the guy falling off the end of the bench in the Carmadise. But as I say, the main benefit for the beloved was that the lover would provide a special kind of education. For the boy, pederasty was an introduction into the ways of grown-up society, along with political connections and experience. Thus, pederasty was linked to political life, and for the young man the erotic relationship could be a step on the political ladder. He would give his body to the older man in return. This is, perhaps, why he was expected to put up at least a show of resistance, to mask this underlying exchange of benefits which could, to an uncharitable observer, look like prostitution. Plato was just such an uncharitable observer. He allows his characters to speak in very blunt terms about the benefits the beloved and the lover expect when they embark on an erotic relationship. Nor is he above exploiting these relationships for humorous effect, as I've just mentioned. So it's easy to assume that Plato's attitude towards this practice was one of stern disapproval. We now talk of platonic relationships and platonic love, meaning loving relationships that don't involve sex. This gives the impression that Plato was the Nancy Reagan of the erotic. His advice to us is, just say no. But in fact, Plato's interest in the erotic as a whole, and in these pederastic relationships in particular, was complex and multifaceted. A number of his dialogues feature erotic themes, sometimes in the form of the dramatic setting as in the Carmadines, and sometimes in passing, as when Socrates teases Mino, saying that as a good-looking young man, Mino is always fishing for compliments. But there are two dialogues that are especially important when it comes to his treatment of eros, the Greek word for sexual or passionate love. These happen to be two of his greatest dialogues, the symposium and the fidris. The symposium is, naturally enough, set at a symposium, or drinking party, an occasion where Greek men would gather in the evenings to lie down, drink wine, and entertain one another with song or conversation. Further entertainment would be provided by flute girls, who were often available for the men's physical enjoyment. In Plato's dialogue with the symposium, the atmosphere is at first quite sedate, since many of those present have already been drinking heavily the night before. Instead of getting drunk, they opt to give speeches in praise of love or eros. At the end of the dialogue, the party gets a lot wilder with the entrance of Alcibiades, a beautiful young man who gives a speech in praise of Socrates instead of love. Plato's masterstroke here is to have a series of characters give a series of speeches about love. This allows him to look at eros from a variety of viewpoints while showing off his ability to mimic a variety of voices. The two most famous voices are given the two best speeches. These are the voices of Aristophanes and Socrates. But even before we get to them, we are presented with a range of ideas about love. Fidris, the namesake of the other dialogue I'll be discussing in a moment, describes love as a god who brings great blessings. Another character called Pausanias goes one better, insisting that there are two gods called love, one of whom is preferable to the other. The lover enthralled to the lower, common love is indiscriminate and jumps at any chance for sexual gratification, whereas the higher, heavenly love leads its possessor to show loyalty to his beloved. This idea that love can manifest itself as crass desire fulfillment or as an exalted pursuit also appears in the Fidris, as we'll see shortly. After Pausanias things are brought down to earth a bit by Erechsimichus, who is a doctor. Like the pre-Socratic Empedocles, he sees love as a force that pervades the cosmos. He's particularly interested in its effects on the human body, where love is manifested as the body's harmony and health. This is a reminder for us that in Plato's time, medical ideas had already penetrated into philosophy, and vice versa. But as I say, things really get going with the speech of Aristophanes, a brilliant and funny explanation of erotic attraction by way of a myth. Aristophanes explains that originally, humans were joined in pairs, some with two male halves, some with two female halves, some literally androgynous, that is, combining a male and a female half. These creatures had eight legs and two heads, and could move by somersaulting along the ground. Their speed and strength allowed them to challenge the gods. Mighty Zeus put a stop to this by splitting each of them in half, dividing them into the humans we now see. This explains our desperation for sexual union, we are literally trying to reunite with our missing half. It also explains why, to put it in modern terms, some people are homosexual and others heterosexual. Men who love men are split from a man-man pairing, whereas those who love women are split from an androgynous pairing. Aristophanes hastens to point out that men who love men are more manly, since they derive from a composite creature which was entirely male. Aristophanes' myth befits the comic poet Plato has chosen to deliver it. For instance, Aristophanes concludes by threatening that if we do not respect love and the other gods, Zeus may split us up again, dividing the left side of our bodies from the right side, sawn in half between the nostrils. Plato also has Aristophanes constantly protest that he's being serious, which gives us to understand that the rest of the company is laughing at the images he conjures up. Yet the myth makes a serious point too, namely that erotic love is a desire for union in the strongest possible sense. We are, according to the myth, incomplete, and we desire to possess our other halves again. As Aristophanes says, if a god were to appear to two lovers and offer to rivet them together so that they could never be parted, they would say that this is their heart's desire. Again, the way this is put has comic overtones, but one shouldn't underestimate the idea that love is really a desire to possess, and in some sense even become identical with, the beloved. Even in the book of Genesis, it says that man and wife become one flesh when they are united in marriage. Socrates, though, is having none of this. In typical fashion, he sets out not just to give a speech in praise of love, but to disprove the ideas of love that have come before him. A beautiful young poet named Agathon has spoken following Aristophanes, and praised Eros again as a beautiful and wondrous god. Socrates refutes him, first in a short discussion with Agathon, and then by means of his own speech. Of course, Socrates doesn't really like to give speeches, as he says at the beginning of the Apology. Instead, he claims to be recounting a discussion he had with a wise female philosopher named Deotima. Deotima's speech casts doubt on Agathon's idea that love is a beautiful god, and on Aristophanes's idea that love is a yearning for possession and union. Deotima admits that love is a divine being, a demigod if not a god. But she objects to Agathon's effusive praise of Eros. After all, what is love but desire for what is beautiful? And if I desire something then obviously I don't have it. So, if Eros is a divine being, he can't be beautiful and wondrous. Rather, he is poor, rough, and barefoot, seeking desperately after a beauty and wisdom that he never attains. Sound like anyone we know? It seems Socrates is, through Deotima, engaging in a little bit of self-portraiture. But if love is a longing for what one doesn't have, then why doesn't Socrates or Deotima agree with Aristophanes that it is a yearning for union with our missing half? Deotima alludes to Aristophanes's idea directly, and disagrees with him too. She says that if I desire something, that can't be simply because it is a part of me, but because I consider it to be good. After all, she points out, I'm happy to amputate a limb if it's infected. Love, then, is not about possession. It is about seeking what is beautiful, what is good. No prizes for guessing where this is going. If I am after what is beautiful, then it will be a mistake to satisfy myself with beautiful bodies. Rather, I should seek after beauty itself, the form of beauty. This is just what Deotima goes on to say. Our desire for beauty is a desire to, as she says, give birth in the beautiful, to transcend our limitations and finitude by seeking immortality. This is why people seek to produce children, as a way of living on after their deaths. But this is a poor sort of immortality, just as the beauty of body is a poor sort of beauty. So it is a rather debased expression of love if the lover contends himself with the beauty of boys' bodies. A true seeker of beauty will realize that it is not just this one boy's body that is beautiful, but other bodies too, and from there will rise to admire the beauty of souls. This kind of lover will wish to educate his beloved and not just sleep with him. In praising this sort of impulse, Deotima seems to give qualified Platonic approval to the pederastic practices of his culture, at least insofar as they revolved around education of the young and not physical consummation. But this is not yet the highest rung on the ladder of love. Ultimately, the lover's interest in the education of souls will lead him to pursue beautiful laws in order to improve as many souls as possible. Thus a figure like Solon, the lawmaker of Athens, is revealed to be an advanced practitioner of the erotic arts. Even Solon though has not ascended the ladder to the top. The lover who graduates to the highest step is the one who seeks after and arrives at beauty itself, what Deotima calls the great sea of beauty. This lover achieves immortality not by giving birth to children or by writing laws for a city, but by grasping unchanging immortal truths, the nature of beauty itself. According to Deotima then, all the other loves she has described are merely defective versions of philosophy, for the true love is love of wisdom, and this is of course nothing other than philosophy. Once it reaches this exalted height, the dialogue is brought crashing back down to the context of a drinking party by the arrival of Alcibiades. Garland did with flowers, and more than a little drunk, he gives a raucous speech in praise of Socrates rather than Eros. This is the speech that was mentioned by Raphal Wolf in my interview of him back in episode 17. It's the most powerful evocation of Socrates in the dialogues, but today our theme is love, and not this particular lover of wisdom. So I'll move on now to Plato's other great dialogue about Eros, the Phaedrus. Like the symposium, the Phaedrus matches an erotic setting to its erotic themes. Here we encounter Socrates in nature, outside the city walls of Athens, a rarity for Socrates who prefers to stay in the city where he can discuss philosophy. A discussion ensues nonetheless, as Socrates is also encountered by the beautiful young Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus flirt in this bucolic setting, and in a dramatic device not too dissimilar to that of the symposium, trade speeches on the subject of love. More specifically, the speeches concern the question of what kind of older man a boy should agree to gratify. Should he prefer a lover who is really in love with him, or one who is not? One way to phrase this central question of the Phaedrus is this. Is a lover also a friend? Does love really make a man provide benefits for his beloved, or does it rather give him reason to harm the beloved? Socrates suggests it may be the latter. After all, the lover doesn't want to encounter resistance, he wants the boy to give in. So it's in his interest for the boy to be weak. He wants the boy to be dependent on him. Any advantage the boy has, for instance wealth, will make the boy more independent, so he will scheme to harm, not benefit, the young object of his desires. To this one can add that the lover will abandon the boy as soon as the boy's good looks fade, as soon as that beard starts to grow in earnest. A non-lover, by contrast, will be motivated not by physical lust, but by goodwill and friendship. So the boy should give his body not to the besotted lover, but to an older man who is merely a friend. At this point, Socrates's divine sign speaks up. You might remember this supernatural signal that warns him when he is about to do something wrong. Socrates recants immediately, and gives another speech arguing in the other direction. The boy should after all gratify the lover, not the non-lover. To explain why, Socrates offers one of the most famous images in Plato. Our souls, he says, are like a team of winged horses being steered by a charioteer. There are two horses, one noble and obedient, the other vicious and wild. The charioteer must try to steer a straight path with these flying steeds, keeping the bad horse under control. If he succeeds, he may be able to stick just his head up into the realm beyond the heavens, where the gods process in their own chariots. There the soul may behold justice, temperance, and knowledge. In short, it is able to see the forms. But the bad horse drags some souls down to earth, and these souls lose their wings as they are joined to an earthly body. It seems obvious that this image reflects the theory of soul we saw in the Republic. The wild horse represents the desiring soul, which tries to defy reason, and the good horse stands for the honor-loving spirit, which can help soul to subdue desire. The charioteer, of course, symbolizes our rational soul. The theory of recollection also seems to be making an appearance, since Socrates talks about the fallen souls as having forgotten what they beheld above the heavens. It's nice to see familiar Platonic themes turning up in this evocative setting, but what does any of it have to do with love? Well, Socrates explains that when we see beauty, for instance the beauty of a boy, our soul is reminded of the beauty it saw above. Some souls yield to the seduction of physical beauty and seek physical gratification, but the better souls are prompted to grow their wings again. This is a painful process and the soul does not understand what is happening to it, which is why falling in love is so agonizing and bewildering. The boy is, then, used as a kind of prompt for the recollection of beauty, a more emotionally intense version of the kind of prompting we were told about in the Phaedo, where equal sticks and stones led us to recollect the form of equal. The boy too is eventually drawn into this erotic yearning. Like the lover, the boy's passionate side, represented by the bad horse of his soul's chariot, may lead him to give in to crude physical union, but if the good horses prevail, the two will remain chaste and engage in what turns out to be a truer and more lasting union, the shared pleasures of philosophy. In a way it isn't surprising that Plato sees philosophy as a manifestation of love. After all, the Greek word philosophia does literally mean the love of wisdom. This etymology has nothing to do with eros, it is rather related to the word philia. That's a word with a broad application. For instance, the relationship between parents and their children is one of philia, and sexual love or eros is compatible with philia too. I'll follow common practice and use the English word friendship as a translation. Which might make us realize that there's something rather unsatisfying about the account of love we've found in Plato so far. Some have complained that in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato gives an account of love which is completely divorced from friendship. The scholar Gregory Vlastos accused Plato of a failure of moral imagination here, insofar as the Symposium in particular doesn't give a successful account of interpersonal love. Instead, Plato presents erotic relationships as mere occasions for ascending to beauty itself and the other forms. If this is right, then one beautiful person will do just as well as any other, the same way that any two equal sticks will serve equally well to remind me of the form of equal. But this is to assume that Plato was in fact trying to give an account of interpersonal love in Diotima's speech. Perhaps this issue just wasn't on Plato's agenda in the Symposium. This doesn't mean he would have nothing to say on the subject. And that he did have something to say is clear from a less famous work called the Lysis. The Lysis is a more typical Socratic dialogue. Socrates and some young interlocutors try to define something and fail in their attempt. In this case, the term to be defined is philia, or friendship. The dialogue is shorter than the Symposium and lacks its mythic and literary power, but it is worth reading nonetheless. Talking to yet another beautiful boy, the Lysis of the title, Socrates wonders whether it's true that birds of a feather really flock together. That is, do friendships spring up between people who are alike or unalike? After presenting objections against both options, Socrates decides that all friendship is based on a love for some kind of good. If I am your friend, it must be because of your goodness and it must be for your sake that I am your friend. This is an idea about friendship that we'll be seeing again when we get to Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics. As usual, Plato is ahead of the game, and he does seem to be showing an interest in interpersonal love. It is my friend's goodness, not goodness in general, or the form of goodness, that serves as the basis for our friendship and the friendly feeling I bear towards my friend is for his sake. But even here, Plato makes sure to integrate philosophy into his account of love. If I am a philosopher, it is because I bear this relation of philia towards wisdom, seeking after this great good which I am so far lacking. So, Plato seems deeply committed to the idea that philosophy is really a kind of love, a longing and passion for wisdom. It's easy to miss this passionate aspect of philosophy when we are in the midst of some technical argument about metaphysics or epistemology, but Plato makes sure we don't miss the point by using the powerful mythic imagery of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, all those heavenly chariots, soul-sprouting feathers, gods and demigods. These are only two of the dialogues in which Plato uses myth as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing philosophical ideas. In fact, many of the dialogues we've already looked at like The Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic feature elaborate myths which I've left out of consideration so far in these podcasts. That would be doing Plato a disservice. So, in two weeks in the final episode I'll be devoting to Plato, I will look at his use of myth and consider his attitude towards myth and towards literature more generally. But first, I'd like to look a bit more at these wonderful dialogues I was discussing today. Unfortunately, I happen to have a friend who has written extensively on Plato's erotic dialogues. So, join me in the next two episodes, first an interview with Frisbee Sheffield about Platonic love, and then a look at Plato and literature, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.