Our first class attracted eight brave souls and generated a fantastic discussion based on the feeling, common to many, that when you love somebody, your love for them makes you want to be a better person. We pursued this idea by looking at Plato's Symposium and the argument in there that our erotic longing can only be satisfied by the pursuit of wisdom, love of the whole.NOTES FOR THE CLASS
Our first class sets the stage for our collective examination of love this year by examining an ancient concept of love named by the word “eros.” Our presentation tonight will be based on some ideas from Plato’s dialogue called Symposium. You can read the dialogue in its entirety right here.
Each month, information, readings and other materials will be posted there. Additionally, our discussion can continue after our meeting by anyone posting comments to various texts on the bog, and anyone who would like to can post their own materials, making the content and direction of the course collaborative and interactive. Next month’s topic: romanticism and the classic romantic story.
EROS
An early recorded philosophy of love – an attempt to think about what love means – is found in Plato’s dialogue called Symposium. The work dramatizes a raucous drinking party of Athenian men who decide, in order to avoid additional hangovers (excess desire for intoxication) chose to spend their dinner attempting to put into words why love is important, valuable, its nature, risks and ultimately, what our deepest desires wish to achieve in being satisfied.
Many important and enduring questions are raised:
1. Love inspires the deepest virtue in people. Love makes you want to be a better person (in the eyes of your lover). But does it always inspire virtuous behavior? If not, what is the difference between love that does and love that doesn’t, make you a better person?
2. What does the satisfaction of our desire promise? Love seems connected to the perception of beauty, and to goodness, and so happiness. But what is the kind of happiness that the satisfaction of love imagines, and is it achievable?
3. What explains the power and ecstasy of love? Chemicals, biology, transcendence, evolution, transpersonal identification, cosmology? The ultimate conclusion of the Symposium is still subject to heated debate 2,500 years after it was written. But “platonic love” is the meaning handed down. The word “eros” which the Greeks conventionally used to mean indiscriminate sexual desire (the “zeal of the sexual organs”) is deep down a desire for ever-lasting possession of good – eternal well-being. It is spiritual, involving body and mind, and a vehicle to the divine.
Excerpts from Plato’s Symposium
1. The Speech of Phaedrus – Love as a Principle of Ethical/Spiritual Development
“First in the train of gods comes EROS. And Acusilaus agrees with Hesiod. Thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge Love to be the eldest of the gods. And not only is he the eldest, he is also the source of the greatest benefits to us. For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live at principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else… Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.”
2. The Speech of Aristophanes – Explaining the Self’s Desire for Wholeness
“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"-there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”
3. The Speech of Socrates (channeling Diotima) – The Promise of Erotic Longing
“And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, 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, my dear Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia,"is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible-you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty-the divine beauty, I mean, pure and dear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life-thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?"
1 comment:
This first class resonated for the following day or so, bringing up thoughts and questions about the true nature of deeper longings - what is it that I seek? What is the nature of happiness, pleasure and satisfaction that seems to be at the root of my daily energy? And when it is not, where is it? Is it even possible for that energy not to be present? Perhaps it is only hidden behind some fear or other issue.
The idea that we would step off from Socratic philosophy brings to mind too - and into starker relief - the belief that there is more: another realm of being and thinking; a way of being integrated to the whole that might fill in so much of this longing. A way of thinking & being that was lost to Socratic society and thus to all of us that have come since.
So it could be the absence of this integrated, connected way of being that might ultimately drive the question: what is it I seek? What is the nature of love? We would not seek these answers if we had in abundance that which we ponder so deeply.
I can see this as a place to start - a necessity in any endeavor: a group of men trying to impress each other, feeling slightly numbed by the remnants of alcohol in their system, perhaps isolated from a more bodily understanding in a way that enhances the activity of the brain and its rationalization they so cherish. The hangover may even be an allegory for the after affects of a much more historical over-indulgence of separate consciousness; pre-frontal lobe-, elitist-, dominance-oriented-relationship with the cosmos as they are manifest real as our Earthly web of life.
So a prediction - perhaps we will find useful answers inside of our current paradigm through this study. But, just as likely, it will necessarily lead to an exploration of a different paradigm, one that posits a way of relating to all-that-is in a distinctly different manner from our current mode. And, in so doing, we can't but help integrate the two realms - and maybe even take a step toward elusive happiness and an understanding of love.
Post a Comment