60 in 60: #23 – Plato’s The Symposium (Penguin’s Great Ideas)
This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.
The Symposium
by Plato (429-347 BC)
Memorable Line
“Socrates sat down and said, ‘How splendid it would be, Agathon, if wisdom was the sort of thing that could flow from the fuller to the emptier of us when we touch each other, like water, which flows through a piece of wool from a fuller cup to an emptier one.”
The Skinny
A surprisingly rich, entertaining, and funny book of conversations between Socrates and his friends on a variety of fundamental subjects, including love, death, and truth. (Although some of it may make modern readers uncomfortable.)
Relevance? Argument?
Imagine you meet up with some of your buddies, including S and you all decide to go over to your friend A’s house to drink and talk all night long. It’s so much fun, and includes so much interesting, unpretentious conversation, that one of you decided later to write it all down in a semi-informal way.
Well, that’s what Plato’s “The Symposium” is like, except “S” isn’t Sam or Stephen or Sandra, but Socrates, “A” isn’t Andy but Agathon, the party includes such ancients as Aristodemus and Eryximachus, and you’re in Greece a few hundred years before the birth of Christ. The amiable pace of “The Symposium,” its sly way of making the reader comfortable, seems like a truly radical idea to me, given how many of these Great Ideas books–from Schopenhauer to Freud and beyond–begin and end with the ideas, without the transcript of what led to them.
“Hey, the man from Phalerum! You! Apolodorus, won’t you wait?”…”Don’t make fun of me, just tell me when the party took place.” “Come on, why don’t you repeat this to me now? After all, walking down the road to the city gives us a good chance to talk and listen as we go along.” And thus Plato relates the story of the party with Socrates and a bevy of other ancients.
At first, it seemed frivolous just because it was so shocking compared to the other readings, but there’s a kind of generosity and sense of fun in this approach that makes the philosophical discussion at the core of “The Symposium” much more palatable–Plato has found the perfect delivery system for the reader. (I thought: Imagine if Freud could’ve had a figurative Schopenhauer on his couch, and vice versa, and they transcribed the conversations–”the will is but my id!”–with a few contextual details about the decor of the room, what they drank, etc.)
Plato’s approach is especially useful–although he couldn’t have known it–to the modern reader who might recoil from a statement like: “Those who are cut from the male gender go for males. While they are boys, because they are slices of the male gender, they are attracted to men and enjoy sleeping with men and being embraced by them. These are the best of their generation, both as boys and young men, because they are naturally the bravest. Some people say that they are shameless, but that isn’t true.” The recoiling comes not from the thought of a same sex relationship, but from the idea of sexual contact between minors and adults being actively encouraged.
Another disturbing element to the text, less codified but just as prevalent: an assumption that women are weak and lesser, despite a few kudos thrown their way. These two elements made some of the discussion seem more like that between deranged fratboys in hell than philosophers. At the same time, they’re very serious about boy-man love–if you divorce the discussion from the subject and think about it in general terms, their thoughts on love are very interesting. There’s a kind of innocence to statements like “…what I’m saying applies to all men and all women, too: our human race can only achieve happiness if love reaches its conclusion, and each of us finds his loved one and restores his original nature.”
As the participants agree, mostly through the soliloquies of Agathon, that courage and justice cannot stand up to the power of love, the reader comes to realize, too, that these attributes had physical manifestations in the form of the Greek gods. Still, the conversation often seems to come with an assumption that the gods should not be taken literally–or that the relevant gods so inhabit their domains that the god of love, for example, may only truly manifest through exhibitions of love.
The essential lovability of the participants seems confirmed by such affirmations as Socrates saying, “My good friend, how can I fail to be lost for words, or anyone else, who has to follow such a beautiful and varied speech? The rest was not quite so amazing; but who could fail to be struck by the beauty of language and phrasing at the end. I saw that I couldn’t even get close to this degree of beauty in my speech, and was so ashamed I nearly ran away.” Somehow, I cannot imagine this kind of praise on the internet these days, and it made me quite fond of Socrates–indeed, of the whole group. Socrates is, just possibly, about to hand Agathon his ass, and yet he is going to do so in a spirit of collegial high spirits and love.
But because Socrates isn’t a mean person, he just snips off Agathon’s argument at the point at which it failed for him–”My dear Agathon, I thought you made a good start to your speech, when you said we should bring out Love’s character before turning to the effects he produces”–and heads off into new territory: proving the multiplicative properties of love, pointing out that those who have love still yearn for love, if only for their future self (just as one who is strong still seeks strength, despite their present condition), and in the most agreeable way moves the conversation to both more abstract and more concrete levels.
From there, the book enters into a delightful spiral of thoughts and ideas about love, spurred on by Socrates’ inquisitiveness. For some reason by this point I had it in my mind that they were all lounging on the lawn of the mythical college in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, wearing boater hats and light-colored suits and sipping from agreeable drinks, having the time of their lives. I even thought, for a second, that if Woolf had ambled along, they might have invited her into their company. Might, in fact, have welcomed it. This is the effect Plato’s friendly, informal tone created–to the point that they could’ve been discussing the etiquette of unblocking storm drains and I would’ve read on, and read on.
This is also the difficulty of summarizing a book that is a conversation, whether on a blog or more patient medium: when you do, the words become more like diamonds, sharper and compressed, losing the essential generosity that gave them life.
Conclusion
(1) The Greeks used their leisure time well. (2) Neal Stephenson has probably hidden parts of this discussion in a 900-page maze somewhere.
Question for Readers
What is your fondest memory of a deep and fond discussion among friends, the kind that lasts until morning? Spill the beans.
Next up, Lucretius’s Sensation and Sex…
January 10, 2009 at 10:33 am
Well, the closest I can remember was when I was in college (my senior year) and a bunch of us were gathered out in the dorm floor lobby and we were talking about the usual stuff – women, drinking, pot, other matters. One of the guys was half-wasted and he was shirtless and was playing around with his nipples and suddenly he discovered that something liquid could be shot out of them. It was a profound discovery, one that the rest of us decided not to explore at more depth. Later on, we were privy to an hours’ long confession of a dormmate’s drunken sins and his giving of libation to the trash can god, who was standing in for the porcelain god that night.
Damn I miss college right now, even if the level of the discussion wasn’t quite on the Socratic level…
January 10, 2009 at 10:52 am
I attended St. John’s College in Annapolis. The Symposium is the highlight of the Freshman year, in the early part of the second semester of readings. It is read again in the Senior year, revisited with the full background of the curriculum. (St. John’s has a fairly set curriculum, following the Great Books of the Western World in chronological order with almost no electives. Everyone reads what everyone else reads and discusses it.) I also attended an alumni seminar on The Symposium, 10 years after I first read it.
At 28, I had far more understanding of the subtext because I had lived a few more years of Life. More than 20 years later, I think I would get even more out of it. I think your comment that a writer has some of these ideas buried somewhere in their fiction is correct. It’s a far more palatable way of examining philosophical ideas, though I used to get lost in the sheer story value of Plato’s various texts. He wrote good fiction.
I take the things that you say are potentially “disturbing” within their historical context. They are a window into how a culture thought. I’m a feminist, so I’m naturally not going to advocate taking the text that women are weak as a permanent truth. We don’t have many surviving texts with the opposing camp’s view, but I’d say Euripedes didn’t dismiss women as a power in The Bacchae or in several other plays. I also don’t believe in slavery, which was quite common at that time.
I think the appeal of The Symposium for “Johnnies” as they’re called is 1) the alcohol and 2) the discussion. We talked this way at St. John’s all day and all night. It was common dining hall fodder. It was a small school of 400 where everyone had read what the Freshmen were reading. Everyone had the seminar schedule for all 4 years and knew what everyone was reading that week. And everyone was used to discussing texts. Professors didn’t lecture. They threw out a question at the beginning of a 2 hour seminar and the rest was done by the 22 students in the room, dissecting the reading and comparing it to previous readings, using a common database of readings. The atmosphere at St. Johns is a constant Platonic dialog complete with all its distractions. Because in a coed school that small, there is plenty of gossip and material for soap operas. All mixed in with these books you’re reading.
I’m having great fun following your journey.
Oz
January 10, 2009 at 10:58 am
Regarding Plato and sex, James Davidson’s recent book The Greeks and Greek Love attempts to untangle some of the Greek attitudes to same-sex relationships which can often seem confused and hypocritical. He points out that in Plato’s final work, The Laws, homosexual acts should be regarded as “utterly unholy, odious-to-the-gods and ugliest of ugly things”. Confusion can also arise over translation (not necessarily in the work being discussed here but generally). Mention of “boys” might refer to the class of children up to the age of 18 or it can also refer to older youths in the Striplings (meirakia) or Cadets (neaniskoi) class. Davidson says that Boys (younger than 18) were protected from the sexual advances of older men while “boys” (Striplings, etc) were seen as being desirable and could be plied with gifts and so on. The bottom line (if you’ll forgive the pun) is that we don’t really know what they were up to since the historical record is so sketchy. As for Plato’s contradictions, no wonder some people prefer Aristotle…
Another thing: Douglas Hofstadter deliberately used Plato-like dialogues to get over complex ideas in Gödel, Escher, Bach
January 10, 2009 at 11:02 am
Neal Stephenson wrote books that short? I never knew…
January 10, 2009 at 11:22 am
Oz–intellectually, I agree re you have to look at it within the historical context. But I still have to report the emotional reaction as a modern reader–it was something that gave me pause. One thing I want to try to do as I’m reading is gauge whether what seems to a modern reader like a Bad Thing invalidates or is irrelevant to the arguments being put forth–i.e., I don’t really believe in the evolution of civilization, but with more historical perspective, did aspects of the society that created the text skew the arguments put forth in a way that invalidates them or lessens their general usefulness now. Most of the time, it doesn’t–and not here, really. Thanks for that great context on uses of the Symposium, btw–much appreciated!
John–I was hoping someone would clarify the boys-men thing re the Greeks, because, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I like to encounter these text with whatever context I’ve already accumulated, without any further research. I’ve studied a lot of Greek culture/civilization/history, but it was many years ago and I couldn’t remember what might have been said on this subject. (And also–I remember enjoying Hofstadter very much.)
January 10, 2009 at 11:48 am
Really enjoying the 60, keep it up. In my 20s, we would drink every weekend, somewhere, anywhere. I would find myself impatiently waiting for the dead hours of 3 in the morning when most of the revealers passed out, and then a few like minded friends and I would wax philosophic until the dawn and beyond. Such thrilling discussions on all matter of subjects, I miss it. But we all moved on. It was a blend of elements, the individuals, the ease of friendship that a long shared childhood brings and the time period, how focused, hopeful and important one is at 23. Now I am depressed, thanks Jeff. I am inspired to rebuild my own personal Symposium here in my exile.
January 18, 2009 at 6:44 pm
In early 1984, I, a playwright then living in Los Angeles, was recruited by St. Johns Graduate Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico for their summer 1984 Philosophy course, as a prelude to earning a Masters Degree in Philosophy. During the first week, I differed with the professor (an ex-priest) about the meaning of Original Sin, while we discussed the Old Testament. The professor invited me out to breakfast, and asked me to refrain from speaking until the following week. I complied. The following week, after we differed on our interpretations of the story of Isaac, this professor went to the school’s administration and engineered my immediate expulsion from the school. So much for open inquiry.
My wife and I had relocated to New Mexico, and had no prospects. I submitted a recently-written play to the state of New Mexico and was appointed Playwright-in-Residence for the state (1985-87). The program was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.