On Plato’s Symposium

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A link to the original Symposium follows the article.

Given the opportunity to speak at a party not unlike one described in Plato’s “Symposium” I would almost certainly have to begin as equivocally as Socrates, for I would very likely be at cross-purposes with the company’s original intention of taking turns speaking “to the best of his ability in praise of Love.” (532) It is an altogether more exciting enterprise to follow in Socrates’ footsteps in defining the features of love, wherever that may take us. Unfortunately, we might not be taken very far. In other words, we might each be stuck trying to figure out what love means in our own anyway.

We can thank Pausanias for being the first to attempt to define the “Love whom we are to honor.” (534) Unfortunately –or not, as the case may be—I would have to apologize to the speakers before me and fundamentally disagree with the premise that Love exists in any personified form of a deity or spirit. For convenience, and because none of the speakers are around to disagree, I will assume that any supernatural claim made in the “Symposium” is strictly metaphorical.

Pausanias seems to have anticipated a main thrust of modern thought on love thousands of years later.

“Now it may be said of any action that the action itself, as such, is neither good nor bad.” (535) “Love itself, as such, was neither good nor bad, but only in so far as it led to good or bad behavior.” (537)

Neither hooks nor Scheler would object to love being implicitly recognized as an action as the first sentence in the parallel indicates, however, that is only half the story. The English usage of the word “love” without proper context is linguistically ambiguous; it refers either to a feeling in noun form or an action in verb form. And, until English speakers begin to use separate words for each sense, in any discussion of “love” both senses should be addressed. Pausanias’ sentiments above might be expressed in the phrase “love is what love does.”

Love as an act, while problematic enough in its own right is accessible in a way that love as a feeling is not. Love as an act is composed of behavior that can be independently witnessed from a third person perspective. Love as a feeling, on the other hand, is in the realm of subjective experience, and therefore can only be directly shared in fragments of imperfect communication.

I would argue that any significant amount of shared meaning of the subjective experience of the feeling of love comes from our fundamentally shared experience of being human creatures. Thankfully, this can be supplemented by a rich human history of Diotima’s broad sense of Poetry, including art and literature etc. This is aided by the fact that the human species is considered a comparatively “small” species genetically; because of a “bottleneck” in human evolutionary history the genetic variation of Homo sapiens is less than many other species.

It is no coincidence then that so much of Plato’s representation of Socrates’ representation to his associates of his discussion with Diotima resonates so strongly to this day.

“This is how every mortal creature perpetuates itself. It cannot, like the divine, be still the same throughout eternity; it can only leave behind new life to fill the vacancy that is left in its species by obsolescence. This, my dear Socrates, is how the body and all else that is temporal partakes of the eternal; there is no other way. And so it is no wonder that every creature prizes its own issue, since the whole creation is inspired by this love, this passion for immortality.” (560)

Love, instilled in us through millennia of evolution, is where it seems most humans find meaning in their lives, and has served often enough so far to perpetuate the species and gives parents a sense of accomplishment in having progeny survive them; a taste of immortality. But as Diotima discusses below, it is not the only route to immortality. “Every one of us, no matter what he does, is longing for the endless fame, the incomparable glory that is theirs, and the nobler he is, the greater his ambition, because he is in love with the eternal.” (560) It might just be the egomaniac in me talking, but this quote seems self-explanatory. Regardless, let us take a glance at the world we live in through the lens of these quotes together. Religion provides a place for us to go for people to tell us we will live forever. The cult of celebrity in this culture might stem from the desire to be famous, to be known widely, and more likely to be remembered. Many writers and others started their craft with the dream of being remembered. We still read Homer to this day. And let us not forget the desire for immortality in its most modern and explicit form, the Singulitarians: people who anticipate that the possibility of living long enough to live forever will happen in our lifetimes, and moreover that living forever pales in comparison to the overwhelming immensity of technological possibility that awaits us.

Diotima and by extension Socrates and Plato seem to find intellectual progeny preferable to the messy biological kind, and there is certainly something to be said for directly contributing to the wealth of human knowledge. But is this all there is to love. Is love just a glorified mechanism for the perpetuation of the species? An idea immortalized in the phrase, “life is a sexually transmitted disease.” It seems like without any firm foundation for the meaning of life itself, there cannot be any objective meaning for love, teleological or otherwise, especially, given a wide enough perspective, if it is considered a means and not an end. In an increasingly intellectually secular world the meaning of life and love each have to be determined on an individual basis.

Let us consider Diotima’s definition: “To love is to bring forth upon the beautiful, both in body and soul.” (558) Let us also accept for the time being the ladder of love, from the specific body to many bodies, to bodies in general all the way to institutions and knowledge until finally one beholds beauty itself,

“Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens or anything that is—but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole.” (562)

Forgiving Socrates for a moment that not only is there no evidence for this eventuality, or even a possibility of evidence, there might be something here. The mention of “oneness” seems to be echoed in many mystic traditions including those from Asia. There is something exciting about the concept of beauty in and of itself; the contradictory nature of being completely empty of all form, and simultaneously, consummately full of meaning. Unfortunately, the pursuit of mysticism at this stage seems to be outside of the purview of rational thought. The closest one might get rationally, could be to analyze the “way of life” of a meditative lifestyle in which one pursues “enlightenment.” In this regard, there seems to already be accumulating evidence for the health benefits of meditation. Maybe the ultimate meaning of love is the pursuit of “being.” But of course here we are back to trying to figure it out on our own.

Addendum-ish thing

I tried to preserve a sense of humor that I would hope to accentuate further if given the opportunity to sit at a symposium-esque event. So please don’t take me too seriously.

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