Sorglose Nacht

Overview

The Symposium is a discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a group of speeches, both satirical and serious, given by a group of men at a symposium or a wine drinking gathering at the house of the tragedian Agathon at Athens.

Background

The Symposium is classified as part of a transitional phase between the early and middle dialogues.It was presumably written around the same time as Plato’s Republic and Phaedrus; with those two texts, it is often considered one of Plato’s literary high points.

The Setup

Fifteen years ago the poet Agathon hosted a symposium to celebrate victory in his first dramatic competition, the Dionysia of 416 BCE. A (since famous) discussion on the theme of love took place at this symposium. ARISTODEMUS, who was present, reported the conversation to APOLLODORUS, who checked it with Socrates. Here, Apollodorus is primed to tell the story again to his unnamed interlocutor and friend. From this point on, he will be quoting Aristodemus.

Aristodemus bumps into Socrates one day and is persuaded to join him (uninvited) on his way to the second day of partying at Agathon’s house, who is celebrating an award he won two days prior for a dramatic composition.

It is recommended by Eryximachus and taken up by Socrates that they entertain themselves by speaking in turn on a set topic, love.

Dramatis Personae

In order of speech:

1. Phaedrus: Regular Platonic interlocutor
2. Pausanias: The legal expert
3. Eryximachus: A typical physician
4. Aristophanes: The famous comic poet
5. Agathon: Dramatic poet and host
6. Socrates
7. Alcibiades: Prominent Athenian statesman, orator, and general

The Speeches

1. PHAEDRUS’ SPEECH: ENCOMIUM TO EROS
   1. Phaedrus opens by citing Hesiod, Acusilaus and Parmenides for the claim that Eros is the oldest of the gods, with no parents.
      1. Hence the greatness of the benefits he confers, inspiring a lover to earn the admiration of his beloved, as by showing bravery on the battlefield, since nothing shames a man more than to be seen by his beloved committing some inglorious act. “A handful of such men, fighting side by side, would defeat practically the whole world.”
      2. Lovers may even sacrifice their lives for the beloved: Alcestis was willing to die for her husband Admetus, and the gods rewarded her by allowing her to return from Hades. (By contrast Orpheus, by comparison Achilles).
      3. Interesting distinction here: Phaedrus here takes Aeschylus to task for making Achilles the “lover”, claiming instead that Achilles was the beautiful, still-beardless, younger “beloved” of Patroclus and citing Homer in his support. (Note: Greek eros is asymmetrical?)
   2. Phaedrus concludes his short speech in proper rhetorical fashion, reiterating his statements that love is one of the most ancient gods, the most honored, and the most powerful in helping men gain honor and blessedness.
2. PAUSANIAS’ SPEECH: PEDARASTY AND ATHENIAN LAW
   1. Pausanias, the legal expert of the group, begins by taking Phaedrus up on his examples, asserting that the love that deserves attention is not the kind associated with Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to the whole city) whose object may equally be a woman or a boy, but that of Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite), which “springs entirely from the male” and is “free from wantonness”; the object of this kind of love is not a child, but one who has begun to display intelligence and is close to growing a beard.
   2. Pausanias says that Athenian law makes a firm distinction between the lover who should be encouraged by the boy and the lover who should be discouraged. He says that when a boy surrenders to sex out of hope for money, political favors, or in a cowering fear that he will suffer abuse (a beating?) from the lover, his surrender is contemptible. Only when the boy is hoping to become wise and virtuous is his surrender to the older man not offensive to human decency. Pausanias thinks that the law addresses itself to children and their “motives” for surrendering to adults.
3. ERYXIMACHUS’ SPEECH: LOVE PULLS THE MAGNETS TOGETHER
   1. Eryximachus ends up speaking instead of Aristophanes, who does not recover from his hiccups soon enough to take his place in the sequence.
   2. Eryximachus claims that love “governs” medicine, gymnastics and astronomy, and states that its principle “regulates” hot and cold and wet and dry and that this results in health.
      1. In a similar manner to the way that the two types of love are defined by their object in Athenian law, qua Pausanias, so it is that the body has its loves both fair and foul. And in such consists the physician’s art.
      2. The analogies he gives are harmony in music (all the musical notes at once are clearly a disharmony), and the seasons/astronomy (wanton love being licentious blight and famine, one supposes, vs. harmonious love in which the balance of wet and dry, sun and shade does good for man and beast), and in divination, etc.
      3. Essentially, I read this all as a sort of classical equivocation of the sense of love that we call “affinity”.
4. ARISTOPHANES’ SPEECH: THE RESULTS OF AN OLYMPIAN COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
   1. His speech is an explanation of why people in love say they feel “whole” when they have found their love partner.
      1. It is, he says, because in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels. There were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half man, half woman.
      2. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods. Zeus thought about just blasting them to death with thunderbolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half.
      3. After chopping the people in half, Zeus turned half their faces around and pulled the skin tight and stitched it up to form the belly button. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature.
      4. He says some people think homosexuals are shameless, but he thinks they are the bravest, most manly of all, and that heterosexuals are mostly adulterous men and unfaithful wives.
5. AGATHON’S SPEECH: THE MUSE OF HUMANITY
   1. Agathon complains that the previous speakers have made the mistake of congratulating mankind on the blessing of love, that they have failed to give due praise to the god himself.
   2. He says that love is the youngest of gods and is an enemy of old age.
      1. The god of love shuns the very sight of senility and clings to youth.
      2. Love is responsible for putting poetry into every person.
      3. He also implies that love creates justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom.
6. SOCRATES’ SPEECH: THE MIDDLE-ROAD TO IMMORTALITY
   1. Socrates starts with typical irony by stating that he might not want to be involved in this, as he didn’t realize we were just going to say whatever good things you can say about anything about love, regardless of their verity. He was just planning on saying some true things about it.
   2. Love is the child of Poverty and Plenty; it is not smooth and light-footed, as one might believe, but beggarly and harsh. It longs for beauty (being born on Athena’s day), which it wants to possess.
      1. Note that just because Love is not beautiful, it is not necessarily the opposite of that. This seems to anticipate an argument that’s going to be forthcoming much later in Sophist.
      2. If the beautiful is equitable with the Good, then love wants to possess the Good, so that it may be happy (which is what the natural result of possessing the Good is).
      3. Further, that obscure object of desire is actually none other than immortality, either in its bodily form (via children, a “line”) or in its soul-form - in the form of art or laws.
      4. That is, the highest good, absolute beauty, is the object that one comes to realize that one seeks, once one comes to the highest rung of the “love-ladder”; the essence or Form of Beauty is indeed the immortality that all love seeks, whether overtly or covertly.
7. ALCIBIADES’ SPEECH
   1. Alcibiades’ speech is an encomium to Socrates, and also an admonition to Agathon against sleeping with Socrates. This doesn’t work, because Socrates is the playa’s playa.
   2. Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates - “it was obvious,” the Symposium tells us - that when asked to speak of love, he speaks of his beloved. No general theories of love for him, just the vividly remembered story of the times he spent with a man so extraordinary there has never been anyone like him - a man so powerfully erotic he turned the conventional world of love upside down by “seeming to be a lover (erastês) while really establishing himself as a beloved boy (pais) instead”.
8. NOTES ON LOVE IN THE SYMPOSIUM
   1. The stories of all the other symposiasts, too, are stories of their particular loves masquerading as stories of love itself, stories about what they find beautiful masquerading as stories about what is beautiful.
      1. For Phaedrus and Pausanius, the canonical image of true love - the quintessential love story - features the right sort of older male lover and the right sort of beloved boy.
      2. For Eryximachus the image of true love is painted in the languages of his own beloved medicine and of all the other crafts and sciences. For Aristophanes it is painted in the language of comedy. For Agathon, in the loftier tones of tragedy.
      3. In ways that these men are unaware of, then, but that Plato knows, their love stories are themselves manifestations of their loves and of the inversions or perversions expressed in them. They think their stories are the truth about love, but they are really love’s delusions - “images,” as Diotima will later call them. As such, however, they are essential parts of that truth. For the power of love to engender delusive images of the beautiful is as much a part of the truth about it as its power to lead to the beautiful itself.
   2. Love is really “two things”: good Uranian love, whose object is the soul, and whose aim is to instill virtue in the younger male; and bad Pandemotic love, whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the older lover. What causes the split is the need Pandemotic love has to mask itself as Uranian love in order to preserve the illusion that the young man’s participation in it is compatible with his status as a future male citizen. It cannot, then, be motivated by a reprehensible desire to adopt a passive, slavish, female pleasure-seeking role. Instead, another motive must be invented for it - a willingness to accept “slavery for the sake of virtue”.
   3. “If only wisdom were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn. If wisdom were that way too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will be filled from you with wisdom of great beauty”. What actually happens, however, is the very reverse. Socrates responds to Agathon’s fancy speech about love with an elenchus, so that his emptiness, his lack of knowledge, flows into Agathon, destroying the wisdom of great beauty that had won his tragedy a first prize the day before.
   4. The story of Platonic love is, one might say, the story of the Platonizing of Socrates.
   5. But the true story of love, the story that is Plato’s Symposium itself, is the story of all these stories. In the Symposium, it takes the form appropriate to its genre and audience. But in the Phaedrus, we learn of the longer more technical road it might take in the future, when armed with a scientific psychology and rhetoric it becomes a matter for experts.

Overview

Socrates, on his deathbed, lays down four arguments for the immortality of the soul to his group of disciples and friends.

The Setup

Phaedo recounts the story of Socrates’ death. Socrates’ death took place so long after his trial because of an Athenian holy season, in which the city was not allowed to be “polluted by executions.” Many friends were present at Socrates’ deathbed, but Plato, apparently, was ill.

1. RHAPSODIZING

   1. The discussion starts with Socrates casually remarking on light things - the apparent attachment of pleasure to pain and why he’s suddenly taken to writing verse since he’s been in jail (he was told to in a dream!).
   2. Socrates then sends an envoy to the philosopher Evenus: Come along! Cebes, befuddled, asks Socrates why “a man ought not to take his own life, but that the philosopher will be ready to follow the dying”. Socrates claims that
      1. Our lives are the possessions of the Gods, and therefore we have no right to take them ourselves.
      2. However, a philosopher should not grieve at his death, as the rewards of the afterlife certainly make the experience of death a “far better thing for the good than for the evil.” He goes on to explain (c):
   3. Death is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body. Now, the philosopher should care not for the pleasures of the body, and hence, the wise man desires nothing more than to enact this very separation of the soul from the body.
      1. The senses deceive us when it comes to the quest for knowledge. The body is a hindrance, not a help.
      2. The philosopher gets the work of knowledge done best with the mind alone; the soul can attain truth best as revealed to her in thought.
      3. Further, our eyes cannot behold absolute (justice|truth|beauty|etc.) Again, our bodies hinder our souls’ progress toward truth. Thus, “either [absolute] knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death.”
      4. Hence, he who repines at death is hardly a philosopher. For at the end, all the vagaries of courage and temperance in the face of death (especially for the philosopher!) should be subsumed by the promises of wisdom in the afterlife.
   4. Cebes, thus, poses the question: “many arguments are required in order to prove that when the man is dead the soul yet exists, and has any force of intelligence.” Socrates is ready to respond.

2. THE FIRST ARGUMENT (THE CYCLICAL ARGUMENT)

   1. Socrates starts with an appeal to a Greek belief in reincarnation. However, in the same breath, he admits that there is no verification of this. So, he suggests starting with a broader appeal. Aren’t all opposites generated reciprocally? (aka. no good without evil).
      1. And this generation is actually “a passing from one to the other” - aka. heating and cooling, division and composition - that is, any opposites require an intermediate process.
   2. So, by analogy to sleep:waking, we are to understand death:life. The process of generation of sleep is falling asleep, and of waking is waking up.
   3. If this is true, by inference (and extension), we can believe in the birth of the dead to the world of the living. And hence the souls of the dead must continue to exist.

3. THE SECOND ARGUMENT (THE RECOLLECTIVE ARGUMENT)

   1. Cebes now offers that Socrates’ favorite doctrine of recollection seems to presuppose a previous time in which we learned what we can come to recollect. Cebes reminds us of the proof of this doctrine (from the Meno) of Meno’s slave remembering geometry.
   2. Socrates offers a second proof of this argument:
      1. If the image of one thing can bring to mind another (your lover’s garment, i.e.), and thus if recollection can be triggered either by things like or unlike.
      2. Extrapolating from here, if seeing particular pieces of wood and stone, and in identifying them as in some way equal, we are recollecting absolute equality, which we have never seen.
      3. Further, if things can only be understood sensually, we must have known about things like absolute equality before we were born, because we certainly haven’t seen/touched/smelled it in this lifetime. This implies absolutely that all knowledge is recollection.
      4. And the ability to access this knowledge implies an uninterrupted medium in which it was stored. This leads to only two possible conclusions. Either we had this knowledge since birth, and continued to know it throughout life, or else we received it after birth, and then lost it immediately, which doesn’t make any sense.

4. THE THIRD ARGUMENT (THE AFFINITY ARGUMENT)

   1. Now, everyone is sufficiently convinced that we’re born from the dead, but apparently not that when we die our souls don’t blow away in the wind and scatter. Socrates suggests here that it might be instructive to know something about the nature of the soul.
   2. Namely, Socrates wants to show that the soul is “uncompounded” and hence “indissoluble.”
      1. The aforementioned essences (Forms), it is agreed, must always be the same (unchanging). And the particulars that partake of Form F are contrawise always changing. Further, you can see and touch the particulars but not F.
      2. So, let’s assume that there are two sorts of existences, the seen and the unseen; these correspond to the changing and the unchanging.
      3. Now, if we are two parts, body and soul, and the body has a clear affinity to the changing/visible realm, meanwhile the soul is obviously unseen. The soul, we have argued, trapped by the body, only finds her home realm of the unchanging in wisdom. Hence, it seems that the soul has an affinity with the unchanging.
      4. Nature orders the soul to rule over the body, a nice analogy to the divine ruling over the mortal. Now, if all this is true, it must be admitted that the soul is “almost or altogether indissoluble.”
   3. This discussion now degrades into some crazy speculation about what kinds of animals the souls of the wicked will be reincarnated as. (Proportional justice: Drunkards as asses and pigs, etc.) Additionally, only philosophers are allowed to attain nirvana, with the Gods, and not be passed back into a new body.
   4. Cebes and Simmias both have some concerns with this line of argument, but are reticent to put them to Socrates. Socrates assures them that it’s cool. Simmias goes first. He poses the possibility that soul:body may be more like harmony:lyre. It seems to Simmias that if somebody cuts the lyre’s strings, it pretty much kills the harmony at the same time.
   5. Cebes then poses the problem that soul:body may be something like weaver:coat: That is, the soul may weave many bodies, and outlast them, but still it will die. He needs Socrates to prove that the soul is absolutely immortal to have any confidence.

5. THE FOURTH ARGUMENT: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE FORMS

   1. Socrates begins with Simmias: He takes umbrage starting with the idea that harmony is a compound. If “the soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the body,” it cannot be prior to the elements that compose it. But, granting (3) above, the soul must be prior to the body. Thus the analogy is false (harmony is made last and vanishes first).
      1. Additionally, harmony is absolute (not measured by degrees). So, if the analogy were true, souls would all be equally good (harmonious), as opposed to some being good, some being bad, etc.
      2. Finally, if the soul were a harmony generated by the physical, it wouldn’t caution us against the lusts of the bodily.
   2. So much for Simmias and Harmonia. Now on to Cebes and Cadmus. Socrates will argue from generation and decay. He will premise his argument on the existence of absolute beauty, goodness, etc. The Forms. He first attempts to set up his premises:
      1. He introduces the argument of Causality: Things that are F (other than the F) are F by virtue of partaking of the F. [Clearly stated, 100]
      2. He introduces the argument of Separation: The F is itself by itself, at least in the sense of being separate from, and hence not identical with, the things that partake of it. [end of 102]
      3. He introduces Impurity-S: Sensible things are impure inasmuch as they can (and, in fact, often do) have contrary properties. (Simmias is both tall and short.) This is also the corrolary to:
      4. Purity-F: Forms cannot have contrary properties. [74] (Whereas sensible things that are equal are also unequal, the equal is not unequal, and hence the equal is not identical to any equal sensible thing.)
      5. Also, Self-Predication: For any property F, the F is F. [100, 102] (Largeness)
   3. So, if all this is true, and things can reject a form completely, but not oppose it as such (3 rejects oddness), then G’s simple participation in F doesn’t necessarily mean that F is that whose inherence is essential to the being of G. So, since the soul brings life, as established above, it must participate in the Form of Life. And by Purity-F, this means that the Soul cannot participate in death. Now, the opposite of death is immortality, and if the soul does not admit death, then the soul is immortal.
      1. “The preceding argument shows that the soul will not admit of death…any more than three or the odd number will admit of the even, or fire…of the cold.”

6. CRAZY UNCLE SOCRATES’ GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

   1. Everyone is pretty happy with that, so now Socrates goes off on a wistful rant about the nature of heaven and earth. This includes:
      1. The earth is a round body in the center of the heavens.
      2. The earth is actually at the bottom of a sea of aether (the heavens), and we are deceived that we dwell atop the earth. If we could fly we could see the true earth/heaven.
      3. Rivers circle this true earth, going underground under the deserts, and this is purgatory.
   2. It is basically a charming overture to purity. After which, he goes to take a bath. Crito is sad. Socrates drinks the poison with good cheer. Everyone is sad.