The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex in the 21st Century

 

"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:

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

 

Oh, the Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!

The Gleaming Sword has been going for roughly four years now, and the last couple years have been particularly productive, but I’ve decided it’s time for a break, or at least a significant slowdown, so I can focus on other projects. Nonetheless, I’ve had a number of ideas on the back burners for months now, and rather than leave them unvoiced, I thought I’d present them all together here in abbreviated form. They’re still only halfway thought out, researched and fact-checked, but here they are nonetheless.

Lana Del Rey: In Praise of No Context

This post was nearing completion when I decided to apply the brakes to my blogging.  The post was to discuss how encountering Lana Del Rey’s music without knowing anything about her personal life and how she is perceived by others enhanced my appreciation for her art. I was particularly excited about making a connection to the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go (2005) and the character Kathy’s deeply subjective enjoyment of a cassette she purchases at school.

From the post that never was:

“Most people have probably had a similar experience: certain lyrics in a song will jump out, taking on a meaning for the listener that the artist never intended or one that is different from what others experience, but what criteria exist for calling wrong someone else’s innermost experience of  a work of art? The experience of art is a meeting of subject and object that is often better without third parties.”

The context-free experience of art is rapidly becoming scarce as we are constantly bombarded with minutiae about every topic imaginable, reading reviews on iTunes before downloading an album, looking up movies on IMDb even as we live-tweet them. Today, we come to art and entertainment through a haze of chatter, a cacophony of others’ voices, but we might be much happier tuning it out.

From Ultraviolence: 

 

 

Cecil the Lion and the Will to Power

I also intended to crank out a piece about the reaction to the news that a dentist from Minnesota had hunted and shot Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, but that was nixed early in inception. I found it interesting how every side of the issue illustrated Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. Killing big game, raging against big-game hunters, pointing out the piety of those who decry big-game hunters, and blogging analysis of the debate (as I’m doing here) all serve to make the self feel superior to others. In Freudian terms, they all feed the ego.

So what could one say that wouldn’t be an expression of the will to power? Probably nothing. As I understand it from my days of heavy Nietzsche reading, the will to power underlies all, or nearly all, human behavior. Taking a clue from a maxim by La Rochefoucauld (previous post), Nietzsche pointed out that even saying “Thank you” is a way of raising oneself above the person who has done you a good turn.

From Daybreak:

“Even when he who strives after distinction makes and wants to make a joyful, elevating or cheering impression, he nonetheless enjoys this success not inasmuch as he has given joy to the next man or elevated or cheered him, but inasmuch as he has impressed himself on the soul of the other, changed its shape and ruled over it at his own sweet will.”

Why Reverse Racism Does Exist

The most potentially controversial of my plans was a post arguing that reverse racism does indeed exist, an opinion very unpopular in certain circles. The argument usually starts with redefinitions of words like racism and discrimination (usually to include power) that conveniently lead, through simple logic, to the conclusion that reverse racism does not even make sense, cannot exist, or is just a misnomer for what is in reality plain old racism. It's a bit of sleight-of-hand the likes of which is increasingly common among the perpetually outraged but which never fools their opponents.

My argument was to be philosophical. In the 20th Century, philosophers began to spend a great deal of time examining language, and one of their favorite preoccupations was regular, everyday speech, which functions in a staggering variety of ways. The reality is that people use the words “reverse racism” to point to behaviors and attitudes based on race that are perpetuated by members of a group that is usually seen as the oppressed against members of the group that is usually seen as the oppressor, and everyone who hears these words knows that. By that right, the phrase is legit and what it describes does happen.

You may find the existence of what is called “reverse discrimination” uncomfortable, you may find it to be negligible compared to the atrocities committed by the usual suspects, you may not like the phrase, you may hate the way it is used to combat any efforts calling for attention to race problems, and you may find it more economical to just call it “racism,” but you can’t just wish it away.

 

How an Atheist Can Enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah

I refused to watch Ridley Scott’s Exodus, because as an atheist (previous post) I see a return of big-budget Biblical epics as exactly the kind of religion-stroking the world is better off without, but I was intrigued enough by Darren Aronofsky’s past films like The Fountain and Black Swan to check out Noah (2014), and I’m glad I did. I loved fantasy elements like the Watchers, savored the way it toyed with orthodoxy, admired Emma Watson’s performance, was moved by the human relationships, and was gripped by the plot. Scenes like the one in which Noah tries to kill Ila’s twins always used to leave me unmoved--I sensed screenwriters trying too hard to get a response from their audience--but now that I’m a father, I was like, “Oh no you don’t, motherfo!”

This is how we interact with stories. Aronofsky said he never intended Noah to be a traditional Biblical epic espousing an exclusively Judeo-Christian worldview, and his film did turn out to have much to offer aside from whatever lessons the religious may find in it. No doubt some atheists would adopt a harder stance, but many atheists such as myself remain open to inspiration--strictly humanist--from religious art.

 

Joseph Conrad’s Use of Irony in Heart of Darkness to Critique Colonialism

The meatiest of my planned projects, one which ill health derailed last spring, was a series of posts focusing on Joseph Conrad’s use of irony in Heart of Darkness (1899) to criticize colonialism. While Heart of Darkness is devoid of sermonizing, I noticed that Conrad often uses officious and grandiloquent language when describing functionaries of the British Empire, precisely when he means to scorn them. And his portrayal of the effects of colonialism on the colonialized is damning--whether the colonialization is military, commercial or in the name of civilization.

And is American imperialism any different? I don’t have a simple answer for that, but I intended to address the question via a look at Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which sets Conrad’s novel against the Vietnam War, and also to examine colonialism as a racist endeavor. My primary text for this last topic would be a chapter from Darkwater (1920) by W.E.B. Du Bois. In  “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois presents a condemnation of white supremacy that I highly recommend reading:

“How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe, which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good.”

Possibly Fruitless Pursuits

A few other ideas were on burners even further back. I was hoping to continue exploring my idea of the thin graphite line, a conception of artists, writers and thinkers as a bulwark against barbarism, in light of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Another idea that may not have panned out was investigating des choses in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) as examples of das Ding in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. A lighter post was to be a look at the variety of pop styles exhibited by Kylie Minogue’s discography from Light Years (2000) to Kiss Me Once (2014).

Alas, these posts will never come to full fruition. However, while The Gleaming Sword is slowing, I am still here. I welcome comments at the bottom of the page or through Twitter (my profile). Now I leave you--only temporarily!--with some music:

 

 

Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window (Zizek/Lacan 4)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

Fantasy space is among the many interesting concepts in Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry. The book explores the concept through examples from film and literature. Here, I will take a look at the concept through Zizek’s own example of legendary director Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) as well as the recent remake of Total Recall (2012).

According to Zizek, “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires.” In works of fiction, fantasy space takes the form of a world within, underneath or in the cracks of everyday reality: dreams, idle fantasies, virtual reality, alternate dimensions. The characters’ adventures within these fantasy spaces enact their desires. One of Zizek’s examples, Robert Scheckley’s short story “Store of the Worlds,” reminded me of Total Recall.

In Total Recal, a factory worker named Douglas Quaid visits a company named Rekall to receive artificial memories fulfilling any fantasy he desires. He chooses to have memories of being a double-agent in the conflict between the government and the resistance. However, as he sits in the injection chair, government agents bust in and try to arrest him for being exactly that: a double agent. As the movie plays out, Quaid learns he was a spy, but the authorities caught him, wiped his memory, and gave him a new life as a common laborer. Quaid fights back and in the end topples the evil regime.

It is possible read Total Recall as mostly occurring within a fantasy space. In this reading, everything from the injection chair onward is a fantasy provided by Rekall. At some point after the film ends, Quaid would wake up and return to his life as a factory worker, albeit with some mind-blowing memories, and the oppressive rule of the government over everyday, hardworking folk would remain in place.

Total Recall presents a clear example of fantasy space as a formal mechanism in fiction, but I eventually realized, for reasons I will explain, it isn’t the best example for illustrating Lacanian psychoanalysis and its efficacy. Zizek’s own example, The Woman in the Window (1944), is a more penetrating work, as well as an enjoyable film noir without the aid of fancy concepts.

The film is about Richard Wanley, an aging psychologist with a handsome wife, two children, and--like Quaid in Total Recall--a desire for excitement. One night as he leaves his club, he notices a portrait of an alluring woman hanging in a storefront window. At that moment, the actual woman who modeled for the portrait approaches him and they end up having drinks back at her place. When her lover storms in and attacks, Richard fatally stabs him with a pair of scissors. The ensuing difficulties in Richard’s life eventually lead to his suicide . . . but then he wakes up back at the club, having fallen asleep in his chair and dreamt the whole scenario.

According to Zizek, this is no clumsy way of providing a happy ending:

“The message of the film is not consoling, not: ‘it was only a dream, in reality I am a normal man like others and not a murderer!’ but rather: in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murders. . . . we could say that the professor awakes in order to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.”

In other words, we each have two sides: one we present to the world and one we keep hidden even from ourselves. The first is an illusory construction of the ego, while the second is the seedy truth of our unconscious. Dreams pull back the veil of the former to reveal what lies beneath.

This is what sets The Woman in the Window apart from Total Recall. In Total Recall, Quaid simply gets the fantasy he wants: he gets excitement, he gets dangerous lovers, he gets to save the world. His fantasy space delivers to his ego exactly what it would devise to flatter itself. In The Woman in the Window, however, the psychologist’s fantasy reveals a repressed and unsettling inner reality: one in which he is a cheater, a debaucher and a murderer.

For that reason, Richard’s fantasy is more powerful, and therefore transformative. In Total Recall, it is hard to imagine that Quaid, upon waking, would be relieved to find himself back in his apartment facing another day at the factory. Richard, however, is overjoyed to find himself back in his daily life. Upon leaving the club, he stops to look at the portrait of the woman once again, and again he meets a woman. But this time, he rebuffs her advance and runs away.  We know he will now relish his humdrum existence like never before.

We have then, two types of fantasy. One is a mere fiction, while the other is an eruption of a deep inner reality. Pleasurable fantasies can also exercise hidden corners of ourselves, but it is the dangerous fantasy that holds the greatest potential for meaningful personal change.

Previous posts in this series:

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t LookAway from Mike Brown

Also related:

Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial

Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown (Zizek/Lacan 3)

The death of unarmed teenager Mike Brown is a problem, and a persistent one (explainer). Watching livefeed of the earliest protests, I remember a commenter speculating that the furor would die down in a couple weeks. I was inclined to agree, and yet here we are two months later and Ferguson remains a prominent issue. As I write this, protests are happening all over the country for #O22 and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon is the target of a Twitter storm. This on the heels of the large protests held earlier this month as part of Ferguson October.

The protesters’ reaction to police officer Darren Wilson’s actions has become an action in itself, thereby instigating a reaction in the form of anti-protesters. The anti-protesters range from racists who hurl verbal abuse at protesters to everyday decent folk discomfited by the whole incident, and it is the objections of this latter group that most interest me. I am convinced they know Darren Wilson was horribly wrong that day on Canfield Drive but for some reason still side with him.

In debate, they will say that riots are bad, that protests achieve nothing and that it’s all race-baiting anyway. They will say the police are heroes who protect the people for little reward. They will say the call to arrest Darren Wilson is a witch hunt and we should wait for the results of an investigation. They will say it’s in the past, so let it go. As mind-boggling as it is, they will complain about young men who wear their pants too low.

All of this avoids the central problem of Darren Wilson shooting Mike Brown to death.

They will even blame the victim. They will tell you things that appear to be true, that he hung around with gang members, wrote rap lyrics, smoked marijuana, shoplifted, and physically threatened a store clerk. They will tell you things alleged, that he assaulted Darren Wilson and tried to grab his weapon. They will tell you things proven false, that he beat Darren Wilson so badly the officer had to be hospitalized with severe injuries. And in doing this, they support a position contradictory to what they know to be true.

Namely, a police officer killing an unarmed teenager is bad, bad business.

The arguments of the anti-protester crowd are the result of defense mechanisms for avoiding the ugly truth at the point of origin: A police officer shot an unarmed teenager dead. Specifically, Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department fired repeatedly at unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, hitting him at least six times (twice in the head) according to a preliminary autopsy. Mike Brown’s death--to say nothing of broader problems such as social inequality and abuse of power--is a stain on the fantasy view of the world that we often trick ourselves into believing is reality. His death is a threat to a more comfortable view of society and therefore must be repressed.

I suspect that what really rankles the average anti-protestor isn’t anything more than mild distaste for people who go into the street (or online) and make a scene. They find all the tears and the gnashing of teeth to be unseemly. Raising a fuss and being an eyesore in public spaces isn’t what decent people do. It may sound trivial, but there is a culture in America within which this is motivation enough to ignore the unjust death of a boy at the hands of the law.

Mike Brown’s death is indeed a stain, a blot, a blemish on the face of American society, and this is less figurative than you might think. Mike Brown’s body was eventually removed from the street, but his face continues to show up in photographs in the news and his name appears on the protesters' signs and in their chants. This week, a mural in New Jersey showing Mike Brown’s face accompanied by the phrase “Sagging pants is not probable cause!!” had to be painted over because it made the local police uncomfortable.

Stain removed. Blemish hidden. Truth repressed.

Through terminology such as defense mechanism and repression, I am applying rudimentary psychoanalytical theory to a social phenomenon. I just read in Lacan by Lionel Bailly that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed some signifiers buried in the unconscious were so integral to the psyche’s coherence that unearthing them would cause the patient to come unraveled. Thus, they were better left untouched. But as individuals faced with Ferguson, we are not facing a truth as psychologically identity-shattering as that, are we?

So you have a choice. Assuming you do know in your heart of hearts that police officers gunning down unarmed teenagers is wrong, you may face this or avert your gaze. You may identify with the victim and say “I am Mike Brown” (earlier post), or you may keep making excuses to avoid looking at the ugly truth. If you choose the former, the world will not fall apart, only your picture of it will. If you choose the latter, you will have further chances to redeem yourself: The next Mike Brown, the next Eric Garner, the next Trayvon Martin will be along all too soon.

 ***

Earlier posts in this series:

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom