We had our second class session on Plato’s Symposium yesterday in my Foundations of Philosophy course, and we focused on what we could get out of the third, fourth, and fifth speeches in the dialogue, delivered by the physician Eryximachus, the comic poet Aristophanes, and the tragic poet Agathon.
Each of those is not just a well-crafted speech about love (in some respect), but as I pointed out to my students, an example of Plato’s mastery of something he sometimes criticizes, mimēsis or imitation. Eryximachus effectively lectures in a rather dry, seemingly systematic manner. Aristophanes tells a wild story, effectively creating a new mythological explanation for sexual attraction that takes us beyond that into what purports to be an explanation of our deepest desires. Agathon turns out not just to be a good tragedy-writer but a master rhetorician, along the lines of the great rhetoric-teacher Gorgias.
Each of the speeches offers us, as is often the case when you read Platonic dialogues, not just with some doctrines and arguments to clarify and examine, but a number of suggestive lines for further discussion that leads us out of the dialogue itself into matters of our contemporary lives and relationships. I won’t go through all of those here, but I’ll provide the highlights, along with my own reflections upon them for the first two of these speeches, on which we spent the bulk of our class session.
Eryximachus’ Speech
We started by noting that Eryximachus generalizes the distinction made earlier by Pausanius between good and bad love, extending it not just to human relationships but to the entire cosmos and all the things in it. Each kind of matter has a particular skill or discipline that deals with it. He discusses the human body, the province of his art, medicine, but also of gymanistics. There is sound, specifically music, handled by that art. Then there are more overarching phenomena, for example weather and the seasons, and finally the gods, and there are human arts that deal with these. Love is in all of them.
Clearly Eryximachus has a notion of love that seems a bit different than what we are accustomed to call by that name and to associate particularly with romantic or erotic desire, relations, and enjoyment. Good love connects things together well and produces a harmony out of them. Bad love does the opposite, producing conflict or strife, disharmony, disorder. The goal of each of the arts that deals with love or one sort or another is to produce good love and to prevent or reduce bad love. In fact, a skilled practitioner can change bad love in some given set of matters into good love, and perhaps even allow us to enjoy a bit of the bad love without experiencing the negative consequences of it.
We spent a bit of time in class on the subject of music. I come into class generally wearing a band shirt of one classic heavy metal act or another, along with a flannel long-sleeve shirt, so they can tell I’m a fan of that genre of music. I ask them how many of them are fans of heavy metal, and a few of them will raise their hands. I ask the rest of them why they don’t like heavy metal, and some of them will list perceived qualities of the music, like it being harsh, aggressive, angry-sounding.
I then ask what Eryximachus would make of that sort of music. It doesn’t seem at all like the kind of music he advocates for. Instead it sounds more like what he would associate with bad desires, bad pleasures, bad love. I then ask the metal fans what they get out of listening to the music, and they try to articulate what it is they respond to and enjoy, even yearn for. Then I ask: will listening to this sort of music make you more disordered in your psyche, lead to you becoming aggressive and angry, and the response (something that has been borne out by some scientific study) is that it actually helps them to feel calmer and more relaxed, though sometimes energized and happy as well. Perhaps a bit of a tangent, but an interesting one.
Aristophanes’ Speech
We move on then to the story narrated by the master comedian. None of my students say that they have ever read Aristophanes, so I tell them a bit about him, including the kind of humor you can find in his plays, particularly in one that bears especially on sexual relations and desire, the Lysistrata. I sketch the plot of that comedy, and we go off on a tangent for a moment differing cultural assumptions about who feels sexual desire more strongly, men or women, and what it takes to impose abstinence from sexual relations for perceived higher ends.
Then we go to Aristophanes’ origin story for human beings, which has us originally double the creatures we currently are. In the beginning human beings had four arms, four legs, one head with faces on both sides, and most importantly, two sets of genitals. You had three sexes in the beginning, those who had two sets of male organs, those with two sets of female organs, and the androgynous ones with one set of male and one set of female genitals. They were far more powerful than we human beings are, and got a little too big for their britches, so to speak. So the gods cut them in half and fixed them up, closing the wounds.
Problem solved, but also new problems created! As two halves of what was previously a whole, these new human beings really wanted to be reunited, so they’d seek out their missing half (or at least some other half similar to their own missing half), embrace them, and then not do anything else. They start dying off because they’re not eating. So their genitals get moved around to the front, and that way when they copulate they can make new human beings, or at least get off and be able to get on with doing other things.
Fast forward now into our own time. What does this story tell us about ourselves as human beings? There are two main matters we focused upon. One of them has to do with sexual orientation and how we think about masculinity and femininity. The other has to do with the notion of us each having a missing half, or if you like “soul mate”.
Aristophanes story has a clear explanation for why people are attracted to other people. Some pairs were members of “androgynous” original human beings, and those sorts of men and women are attracted to the other sex. Aristophanes can’t resist sneaking in a claim that those people are more promiscuous and less faithful in their attachments. Other pairs were originally both male or both female, and those people are attracted to the same sex. Sexual orientation would thus be a matter not of genetics or even birth, but something yet more primal.
Interestingly, Aristophanes also asserts that men who are attracted to men are actually more masculine than men who are attracted to women. Might we read into this the insecure misogyny exemplified by manosphere types, the sorts to claim rather implausibly, like Andrew Tate, that “any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay”? That’s the sort of statement that makes one wonder if those who make it aren’t themselves closeted, self-loathing, and deeply conflicted about their own sexuality. That doesn’t quite seem to map on to Aristophanes’ depiction of male-male love, I’d say, but perhaps might be viewed as a blighted, corrupted form of it.
He does say something about what these men are looking for and enjoying in their relationship with another man. They are motivated not only by sexual desire (eros), but they want a deeper relationship that is marked by two other features. One of these, oikeiotēs, is usually translated as “companionship”. The other is the philia, which we often render (and in this case, definitely rightly) by “friendship”. Now are these three affects only attainable in male-male relationships? It certainly wouldn’t seem so to us, and Aristophanes seems to suggest that is not the case in his speech as well.
What is it, besides companionship, besides friendship, besides romantic love and sexual activity, that the lovers really want? Their deepest desire, one which they cannot articulate for themselves but can respond affirmatively to when a god suggests it, is that they be fused back together into a unity, to live together, die together, and share an afterlife. This is one very robust sense of what it would mean for the person you love to be your soulmate or “the one” for you.
I’ll finish here by mentioning that my students, when asked if that’s what they are hoping for or looking for in their romantic relationships, were not particularly drawn to such an ideal of fusing with the other. They tended to construe it as a loss of oneself, and not even in the other, but in the relationship, the unity of the two in one. Even after I asked about a unity in which both would still retain their identity, they remained a bit suspicious.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.
Sounds like a cool class