Class Reflections: Starting Plato's Symposium
some initial classroom discussions about what love does to and for us, spurred by Phaedrus' and Pausanius' speeches
We came back after skipping class due to Labor Day for the one class session we have scheduled this week earlier today. It’s quite all right that we have this shortened week, since the first main text we’re reading for my Foundations of Philosophy class, specifically focused on love, friendship, desire, and relationships, is Plato’s Symposium. I’ve found in the past that three 75 minute class sessions is about ideal for leading undergraduate students through some of the key ideas of the text, while going off into discussions that apply a selection of the concepts and distinctions to our contemporary lives.
For today’s class session, we focused upon four main matters. The first thing we talked about was the narrative structure of the work, who the various characters are, and how they wound up transforming a drinking party into a delivering a set of speeches about love. Since some of those characters are themselves lovers of each other, and a good bit of the dialogue focuses on male-male love and sexual relationships, the second topic we went into was the complicated and conflicted, sometimes ambiguous or paradoxical, ways the ancient Greeks thought about sexual relations. The third main topic of discussion were a few interesting points brought up by Phaedrus’ speech. Then we finished with the fourth, focusing on the longer speech given by Pausanius, needed distinctions he introduces, and some of the claims he made.
Phaedrus’ Speech: Love Makes The Lover Better
One key claim that Phaedrus advances in his speech is that the feeling or drive of love for another person contributes in some way to making the lover a better person. That very theme of connecting love with moral improvement and character development has been a common one in our own late modern culture. One might point to all sorts of cultural embodiments and tropes in film and television, music, and written formats.
That’s an excellent place to start a discussion which will continue throughout our study of the Symposium, and come up again as we work through other works in the class. Does feeling love towards another person really make the lover better in some way? And if so, how does that work? Phaedrus answer to the second question is that the lover becomes very concerned with how they appear to the beloved, and will therefore strive to be on their best behavior, at least in their presence. As Phaedrus puts it, the feeling of love can better implant the principle that people who wish to live nobly than can other motives, like considerations of wealth, honor, or even one’s family members.
I asked my students to think about whether, when they have a crush, they behave differently when they are around that person than when they are, for instance, just hanging out with their friends. The answer of course is yes, at least in many cases, and we discussed some of the examples of things they might do with friends or family members, or even just random strangers, that they would refrain from doing when the object of their infatuation is on the scene.
Now does that always lead to good, noble, or honest behavior? That’s where Phaedrus’s argument starts to weaken. We sometimes do foolish things to try to impress those we are attracted to or love, don’t we? I have plenty of examples on my own part, and they came up with some as well. Sometimes people actually do bad things precisely because they think will somehow work out well for them as they pursue the one they love, for example, lying to that person.
So clearly as a universal statement, Phaedrus’ claim is going to fail. It won’t always be the case that love in some way makes the lover a better person (or at least behave like one). Should we swing over to the other extreme and say it never does? That would be rather silly, not least since we have experiences of it doing so sometimes for ourselves or for others. So we have to qualify that claim and say that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. And that then can raise our curiosity about why it does so in some cases but not in others.
Pausanius Introduces A Distinction
The second speaker, who seems to be a sort of legal expert, points out that Phaedrus has made a mistake in his speech, presenting love as if it were always something positive for the lover. The distinction Pausanius thinks we need to introduce right away, one that will be taken up afterwards by Eryximachus in his speech as well, is a seemingly straightforward one, that between good love and bad love. He frames it at first in mythological terms, as the distinction between two different sorts of Aphrodites, a goddess associated with love, lust, and sexual activity.
There is a heavenly Aphrodite, who is the “daughter” of the primeval god Uranus (in the myths, sprung from his castrated testicles when they were tossed into the sea, which Pausanius glosses over), and she is the origin of the better kind of love, a loe felt for the soul not the body of the other, one which Pausanius clarifies is from and for the male only. And then there is the earthly Aphrodite, who has her origin in procreation from Zeus and Dione, who gives rise to the more common love, the one we are perhaps more familiar with, which is less discriminating and constant, and which focuses primarily on the body, and quite frankly, is oriented to enjoying the body of the other and getting off in sexual activity.
Is Pausanius contrasting good and bad love in working out this distinction? It’s not quite so simple as that. The love associated with the heavenly Aphrodite and the soul is indeed good. But is the more common love associated with the body isn’t the diametric opposite of the other love. It’s not evil, though it might lead to evil behavior, conflicts, and potentially awful consequences. It’s better described as “not-good”, and that’s because, as Pausanius does say, it is less discriminating. It acts at random. So the person acting under its influence might do good or bad things. You can’t really count on them.
When I ask the students, if we take away the mythological trappings and Pausanius’ focus on just male-male relationships, whether this distinction makes sense to them, and jibes to some degree with their experience, they say that it does. There does seem to be one type or sense of “love”, where it does involve attraction and perhaps even infatuation, and might culminate in sexual activity, but where the real foundation is love of the other person’s soul, or personality, or mind, not just their body. And there is a common desire we human beings have, focused more on the attractive body of the other, or rather bodies plural, that doesn’t have to include any sort of care or respect for the other person as who they are.
Love Between Older And Younger
A significant portion of Pausanius speech focuses primarily upon a particular type of “love” that was common in ancient Greece, the erastēs-eromenon relationship, which involved an older male “lover” and a younger male “beloved”. This is clearly an asymmetrical erotic relationship, and one that as Pausanius rightly views it open to possible abuse and exploitation.
In my class, I remind my students that we need not confine out own engagement with the dialogue to the male-male focus that many of the speakers in the Symposium will assume or privilege. So in our class discussion, we spent a bit of time talking about why in our own contemporary culture there are relationships marked by significant differences in age and maturity between the partners, and along with that differences in what the partners bring to offer each other in the relationship, or indeed expect and sometimes demand from each other. Along the way, we indulged in a bit of joking at the expense of celebrities like Bill Belichick and Leonardo de Caprio.
I posed to them a set of questions that will bear great significance throughout the rest of the semester: when we are in a relationship that can be called a sort of “love”, is what we might call the goodness or value of the relationship based primarily on what the two people in the relationship provide to or offer to the other? Or if we genuinely “love” someone, does this mean we ought to be good to them without expecting some kind of reciprocation. Is there something both parties need to supply to each other, or can it be different things on each side? If we’re hoping or expecting to get something from the other, does that in some way lower or debase the “love” we claim to feel?
We also probed deeper on the issue of these unbalanced relationships, where one person is older and presumably more mature than the other. Pausanius notes that the different Greek states span a spectrum of perspectives on these sorts of relationships, again primarily discussing the matter in terms of male-male relationships. I mention the Goldilocks story, which they all know turns on finding the middle between extremes. On this issue, we have at one end outright prohibition of such relationships on the part of the Ionian Greeks, under Persian control, and on the other end a permissiveness on the part of the less intelligent Greeks (Boetians get mentioned) that renders younger persons vulnerable to rape.
Presumably Athenians would get the matters “just right”, but Pausanius actually says that’s not exactly the case. There is a perplexity, a confusion, even paradoxes arising from the uneasy toleration of these sorts of older-younger erotic relationships. He notes a number of these, for example the latitude accorded to the lover for doing things that might otherwise be viewed as unseemly or shameful in the pursuit of their beloved. That’s an issue we spent a bit of time exploring, thinking about whether there are any equivalents to that in our own cultural representations of relationships in shows, films, and music (there’s a lot!).
Another issue that came up fin looking at Pausanius’ speech was how we ought to evaluate the person who ends up being deceived about their partner in a relationship. Pausanius frames it in terms of the beloved who gives in to the sexual desire and perhaps even demands of their older lover, in the hopes that they are not being treated merely as sexual object to be enjoyed. Even if they are wrong, or outright deceived, about the character of their lover, who they think to be a good person from whom they might acquire some wisdom and virtue, that doesn’t mean that their “giving in” to the less-than-good lover was bad. In fact, Pausanius affirms that it is something good on the part of the beloved.
That’s a good place to close, I think, not least because one can reasonably expect that at least some of my students have already gone through that sort of experience, not necessarily with a significantly older erotic partner, but certainly within a relationship that didn’t turn out to have the basis they thought, assumed, or were led to believe it did. We can say things like “well, maybe you should have thought that through a bit, trusted less easily, listened to other people’s advice”, without blaming the person who was deceived about their lover and the relationship. And we can affirm that the good things about even a bad relationship still do remain good.
We’ll be going into the other speeches from Plato’s Symposium next week, so there will be more of these sorts of reflection articles coming out on those. As a last note, I’m offering an open enrollment online seminar on Plato’s Symposium this coming Saturday. If you’d like to learn more about that, or to enroll in it, here’s where you can do so.
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