"Love's
not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within
his bending sickle's compass come"
--Shakespeare,
Sonnet CXVI
Plato’s Symposium opens with some Athenian luminaries attending a banquet at the tragic poet Agathon’s place. The gathering begins with everyone agreeing not to drink and ends in drunken revelry. In between, the attendees deliver speeches in praise of love, the finest of them by none other than Socrates himself. I don’t intend to offer my own encomium to love here, but I do have some thoughts on the speeches in the dialogue.
A krater depicting a symposium. I took this photo a few years ago at an
exhibit of ancient Mediterranean pottery at San Francisco Airport. From my
notes: Symposia were male drinking parties. Wives were excluded, but hetairai
(courtesans) were welcome. Music, dancing, games and "erotic
activity" were also part of symposia.
PHAEDRUS
What
I find most interesting about Phaedrus’ speech is his use of
the word lover. Today when we use the word lover, we usually think of one of
two in a mutual romantic relationship. A close look at Phaedrus’
speech, however, shows a subtle difference. He uses the word lover to mean one
who is in love with another, with reciprocity common but unnecessary. When he
makes an example of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, he admits Achilles’ love for
Patroclus, but also makes a distinction between lover and beloved:
Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two.
Perhaps I like this distinction on a rational level because it suggests one of the key points in the dialogue, that love is by the inferior for the superior. I decided to reread the Symposium because of references to it in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In the novel, the narrator and titular character love each other as friends, but the narrator goes to great lengths to show that Ravelstein is the superior of the two, and thus the narrator’s devotion.
Or
perhaps Phaedrus’ use of lover simply appeals to me because it allows for
praise of unrequited lovers, who seek to be more virtuous and thereby win their
beloved’s approval. The plight of one who moons over someone one-sidedly--a
situation to which I’m no stranger--seems less unseemly when granted classical
gravitas.
PAUSANIAS
Pausanias makes a distinction between high and low love:
Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.
Judging by the jests they trade, Agathon and company have no small amount of appreciation for comely youths, so they would likely understand our modern obsession with sex, but Pausanias makes the commonplace assertion that when truly in love, you find something more in your partner. In wedding speeches and Facebook posts, husbands and wives are always talking about how “kind, caring and sweet” their partners are. This is something like that, but given how much time the great philosophers of ancient Greece spent pondering the “noble disposition,” I think Pausanias has in mind something higher than mere niceness.
But
that’s for Socrates to elucidate. First, the
playwright Aristophanes--of Lysistrata and Chiraq fame--makes a speech, but only
after having overcome a bout of the “hiccough.”
ARISTOPHANES
Saul
Bellow’s Ravelstein makes much of the sex myth in Aristophanes’ speech. The
idea is that far in humanity’s past, man and woman were one being, but together
they were so strong that Zeus found it necessary to weaken them by separating
them. Severed from one another and finding themselves incomplete, men and women
each yearned desperately for completion. Taking pity on them, Zeus provided a
way for them to rejoin through love and sex. However, this was not limited to
opposite-sex couples:
…or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.
Certainly there is poetry in this, and I used to view the search for love in this way. A good mate fills a hole inside, completes you, shines light in your darkness. Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to see the search for “the one” in Lacanian terms. Everyone has a hole inside that is part of their psyche and can never be filled. Two people just means two holes. Thus, Lacan says that sex--seen as the ultimate fulfillment of two individuals each in the other--is impossible (previous post).
But
Aristophanes’ myth, usually deployed for its picture of two individuals coming
together in perfect harmony, could also be seen as explaining the very
separation described by Lacan. And even Lacan didn’t mean to say that all hope
was lost. While ultimate satisfaction isn’t possible, we can’t help but search
for it, and the search has its own rewards.
SOCRATES
When
it’s his turn, Socrates says that love is always of the beautiful, which is the
good, and one who gains the good gains happiness. Since the good for Plato is
the Form by which all other forms are known, love is nothing less than a
vehicle to a higher state of being:
And the true order . . . is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This . . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.
By now we are talking about love of abstracts, of truth. Socrates typifies this latter type of love more than any other figure in the ancient world, while the love he shares with statesman and general Alcibiades--a love characterized by mutual respect and chaste nights cuddling under a blanket--represents a higher type of love between two individuals.
Does
anyone experience the higher forms of love anymore? Chaste romantic
relationships do exist--just ask Colin Farrell about Elizabeth Taylor--and if all
my time on Twitter has taught me anything, it is that the world is full of
people passionate about ideas, art and knowledge. But whatever form love takes,
Socrates would tell us to do it as best we can so it makes us better people.
Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of
Aspasia, Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Previous posts mentioning Plato:
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