Plato at the Googleplex

  23Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 166.

  24Plutarch, Parallel Lives, “The Life of Alcibiades,” 6.2.

  25Bernard Knox, “The Socratic Method,” The New York Review of Books, January 25, 1979.

  26Robin Osborne, Greek History (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 22.

  27In the Symposium, when Pausanius distinguishes between the good erōs and the bad, he argues that the good is always directed at “boys” rather than females, “cherishing what is by nature stronger and more intelligent” (181c). However, good love is not directed toward boys until they begin to show some intelligence, which starts happening when “their beards begin to grow” (181d). Pausanius then goes on to explain why it is wrong to love those who are prepubescent, and it has nothing to do with protecting the boys but rather the lover of boys: “Actually, there should be a rule against loving young boys, so that a lot of effort will not be squandered on an uncertain project. It is unclear how young boys will turn out, whether their souls and bodies will end up being bad or virtuous” (181e). We have no way of knowing when puberty hit in ancient Athens. James Davidson in The Greeks and Greek Love (London: Phoenix, 2007) argues that it was far later than in our day, though scholars have challenged his arguments.

  28Plato has Pausanius make this point in the Symposium (182). He concludes, not surprisingly, that the way of loving boys in Athens is the most noble.

  29K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 202.

  30George Boys-Stones, “Eros in Government: Zeno and the Virtuous City,” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 169.

  31Fragment 29. See K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed., p. 195.

  32Ancient Greek has several words for love. Agapē is chaste enough that the word and its cognates are profusely used in the New Testament. Pothos is a sort of longing, usually for someone who is absent. Himeros comes over a lover almost like a physical sensation, from either the sight of the beloved or the thought of him. Plato’s Phaedrus is filled with images of himeros streaming into the lover at the sight of the beloved, and Plato describes this stream as reversing itself and flowing back to the beloved until both of them are drowning in himeros, this exchange of himerotic fluids not necessarily involving any actual bodily fluids—in fact, from Plato’s point of view, far better if not. Erōs is the full-on obsessional “in love” experience, the kind that makes a person do crazy things, like move from New York to Boston. It is very heavy on the longing. Davidson, who nicely distinguishes between these various Greek love terms, remarks, “Erōs is, with only a few exceptions, utterly one-sided. You can be longed for, loved (philein), desired ‘in return’…with no problem, but for the Greeks there can be no mutual erōs, not concurrently. Erōs doesn’t work like that. He is a vector, a one-way ticket from A to B” The Greeks and Greek Love, p. 23.

  33If the erotogenesis is the same, in Aristophanes’ tale, for homosexual and heterosexual love, the former is still superior. “Only men of this sort are completely successful in the affairs of the city. When they become men, they are lovers of boys and by nature are not interested in marriage and having children, though they are forced into it by custom. They would be satisfied to live all the time with one another without marrying” (Symposium 192a–b).

  34Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 197.

  35Georges Devereux, in “Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the ‘Greek Miracle’ (Symbolae Osloenses 42 [1967]: 69–92), speculates that Greek society cultivated prolonged adolescence and that this explains both their polymorphous sexuality and the explosiveness of their genius. Devereux is important to Greek scholarship, according to Davidson, because of his “seminal influence” on Dover: “indeed he,” [that is, Dover] “began the project,” [that is Greek Homosexuality], “with Devereux as co-author.” The Greeks and Greek Love, p. 84.

  36“Since the reciprocal desire of partners belonging to the same age-category is virtually unknown in Greek homosexuality, the distinction between the bodily activity of the one who has fallen in love and the bodily passivity of the one with whom he has fallen in love is of the highest importance.” Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 16.

  37“The inner experience of an erômenos would be characterized, we may imagine, by a feeling of proud self-sufficiency. Though the object of importunate solicitation, he is himself not in need of anything beyond himself.… For Alcibiades, who had spent much of his young life as this sort of closed and self-absorbed being, the experience of love is felt as a sudden openness, and, at the same time, an overwhelming desire to open.” Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 188. Nussbaum’s superb readings of both the Symposium and the Phaedrus in The Fragility of Goodness have influenced me a great deal.

  38C. D. C. Reeve, “Plato on Friendship and Eros,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2011 edition. Online at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/plato-friendship/.

  39Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, The Symposium and Phaedrus, translated with introduction and commentaries by William S. Cobb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

  40Cf. Cratylus 398c, a dialogue that investigates language and tries, albeit playfully and tentatively, to come up with possible explanations for why things are called (in Greek) as they are. When the word daimōn comes up, Socrates connects the word with daimones (knowing or wise). “And I say, too, that every wise man who happens to be a good man is more than human (daimonion), both in life and death, and is rightly called a daimon.” Translation here is by Benjamin Jowett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). He then goes on to connect the word hero with erōs, and to connect the word eros with erôtaô, which means “I question,” concluding that heroes are those who know how to question, meaning philosophers, while at the same time connecting the erotic with questioning, and also claiming an essential connection between philosophers and the erotic, which last claim accords with Lysis, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus. All of this etymology is intimately connected up with the transformation of the Ethos of the Extraordinary wrought by Plato, by means of which the many ways of becoming extraordinary are reduced to only one, consisting in the extraordinary exercise of the faculty of reason that is, as Plato would have it, philosophy.

  41See chapter θ.

  42The internal dating of the Symposium presents complicated and contentious issues. The party is in celebration of the young poet Agathon’s having, for the first time, taken first prize, so that allows scholars to date the party as having taken place in 416. But the party is recounted from a distance of several years, and the question is how many years? Why are people suddenly running around Athens trying to get the details of that party straight, as the prologue to the dialogue suggests? The date is traditionally put at 400. David O’Connor, in his edition of the poet Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, argues that, on the contrary, it is sometime in the spring of 399, and the flurry of interest in Socrates is occasioned because word has leaked out that he is to be put on trial. Martha Nussbaum (in The Fragility of Goodness) argues for an earlier date, 404, on the grounds that the flurry of interest is actually centered on Alcibiades, with all of Athens first fixated on whether Alcibiades will return to save a languishing Athens, soon to lose in the protracted Peloponnesian War, and then learning—during an interim indicated in the prologue—that Alcibiades has been killed.

  43Xenophon, in fact, links Critias with Alcibiades: “Among the associates of Socrates were Critias and Alcibiades; and none wrought so many evils to the state. For Critias in the days of the oligarchy bore the palm for greed and violence: Alcibiades, for his part, exceeded all in licentiousness and insolence under the democracy. Ambition was the very life-blood of both: no Athenian was ever like them. They were eager to get control of everything and to outstrip every rival in notoriety” Memorabilia, Book 1, Chapter I.

  44“We have no evidence ou
tside the Symposium for a female Mantineian religious expert named Diotima, and in any case it is unlikely that any such person taught Socrates a doctrine containing elements which, according to Aristotle, were specifically Platonic and not Socratic. Plato’s motive in putting an exposition of Eros into the mouth of a woman is uncertain; perhaps he wished to put it beyond doubt that the praise of pederastia which that exposition contains is disinterested, unlike its praise in the speech of Pausanias.” Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 161, n. 11. Some commentators have speculated that Diotima might have been based on the historical figure of Aspasia, who was Pericles’ brilliant mistress, a woman who actively participated in the circle of intellectuals surrounding Pericles. Plato mentions her by name in Menexenus, having Socrates there declare that not only he learned the art of rhetoric from her, but so did Pericles. “She who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus” (235e). Commentators have pointed to this passage as an indication of the high regard in which Plato held Aspasia, although other interpretations—insulting to Pericles—are also possible.

  45Alexander Nehamas endorses this Nietzschean reading of Socrates: “Those who practice the individualist art of living need to be unforgettable. Like great artists, they must avoid imitation, backward and forward. They must not imitate others: if they do, they are no longer original but derivative and forgettable, leaving the field to those they imitate. They must not be imitated by too many others: if they are their own work will cease to be remembered as such and will appear as the normal way of doing things, as a fact of nature rather than as an individual accomplishment.… Nietzsche in particular was tyrannized by this problem. This aestheticist genre of the art of living forbids the direct imitation of models. Why is it, then, that Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault all have a model? And why is their model always Socrates?…These philosophers care more about the fact that Socrates made something new out of himself, that he constituted himself as an unprecedented type of person, than about the particular type of person he became. What they take from him is not the specific mode of life, the particular self, he fashioned for himself but his self-fashioning in general” (The Art of Living, p. 10). Nehamas concedes that the only Socrates we know is essentially the literary creation of Plato. Does he then believe that Plato, by creating his Socrates, is endorsing the aestheticist conception of philosophy as the creation of an inimitable self for oneself? Nehamas’s Nietzschean conception of Socrates is far more in line with Alcibiades’ conception of Socrates, which is all about the inimitable uniqueness of this man, a conception which Plato seems to reject in the Symposium, not only within the content of Socrates’ speech, but also by giving the contrasting view to mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Alcibiades.

  ϛ

  xxxPLATO

  (illustration credit ill.8)

  Margo Howard is a journalist and the daughter of the legendary advice columnist Esther (Eppie) Lederer, known to the world as Ann Landers. Margo eventually went into the family business. For many years her advice column, Dear Prudence, was published in Slate magazine, syndicated in more than two hundred newspapers, and featured on National Public Radio. She then went on to write her Dear Margo column for Women on the Web (wowowow.com) and Creators Syndicate.

  Ann Landers was renowned for her Rolodex, which contained the names of such eminent friends as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, the theologian and university president Father Theodore Hesburgh, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, all of whom she consulted in offering her guidance to the perplexed, quoting them in her columns. Her daughter Margo is similarly inclined, as she demonstrates below:

  Dear Plato,

  Well, I told you you’d be hearing from me. Just on the off-chance you don’t remember me, I was at Marty and Anne’s New Year’s Eve festivities, the redhead to your immediate right whose diamond earring you gallantly retrieved when it somehow got lost down your chitōn while I was whispering in your ear to tell you who the other guests at the table were. Marty and Anne tell me they’ve only recently met you, whereas the three of us go back to ancient times. But in case you need a boost in the ego department, cupcake (or should I call you baklava?), let me tell you that they just can’t stop singing your praises. To hear them tell it, there hasn’t been another like you since the dawn of civilization.

  You were very gracious in agreeing to be one of the expert consultants for my advice column. You’d be surprised how many questions have a philosophical angle, or then again maybe you wouldn’t be. You sure got the attention of the room when you announced that philosophy is really all about eros. I think everybody, including me, suddenly regretted not having majored in philosophy. After hearing that announcement, I thought you wouldn’t object to my sending a few of the racier queries your way.

  I’ll cite you by name, of course, together with all your official titles. Just let me know if you’re game. You mentioned that you were eager to learn about our society, and believe me, honeypie, nothing gets you under the covers more quickly than the sort of questions that I get sent.

  xxxMargo

  Dear Margo,

  Yes, I remember you very well. Please feel free to send me any queries for which you believe I might be helpful. I have no official titles beyond that of philosopher. As it means “lover of wisdom,” it seems all the title that anyone could ever desire. The only hesitation is in the deserving of it.

  xxxPlato

  Dear Margo,

  I’m a female graduate student, and though I’m sexually adventurous, I’m no slut.

  One of my professors has proposed that he be my “professor with benefits,” if you get my drift. We’ve both got partners, but our relationships are open, so there’s no question of cheating. There’s also no possibility that we’d get emotionally involved, since our affections are otherwise engaged. Frankly, I see this as a good educational move on my part. The man is one of the best minds in my field, and I’d learn a lot from the extra face time with him. Conversations with him are always stimulating (yes, pun intended). He’s also got powerful connections and promises he’d help me professionally. The job market in my field has tanked, and though I’m at a top-notch department, we grad students need all the help we can get. I trust my professor to keep his word, since all indications are that he’s a man of honor, and he’s been completely up front with me. Do you think I should take him up on his offer that we mutually enjoy and use each other?

  Yours truly,

  Pursuing Higher Dreams

  Dear PhD:

  Wow, the casting couch has moved to academia. What theatrical people call “a good career move” you are calling “a good educational move.” I can tell you that your crystal ball can’t be entirely trusted when it forecasts that neither of you will become emotionally involved. One never knows how these things will play out. But, hey, if you fell for each other and ditched your partners, think of the professional possibilities! You do seem clear-eyed, however, about mutually using each other … you and this “man of honor.” What you are suggesting is commerce, my dear. There is a name for people who trade sex for money or entrée. If you are comfortable with that, fine with me.

  But this being a full-service advice column I decided to consult one of the world’s leading experts in moral philosophy. Plato is probably the most quoted thinker in the world, and now I’m joining the crowd. Here’s what the philosopher has to say:

  “I commend PhD for the high value she places on wisdom and knowledge. For wisdom’s sake, there is no disgrace in being servant and slave to a lover, no reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise (Euthydemus 282b).

  (So says Plato, leading me to parenthetically remark that now I know why they call them “philosophers,” which literally means “lovers of wisdom.” These philosophers really have the hots for wisdom. But before you think Plato has given you the green light for knowledgeable nooky, PhD, he’s got some serious reservations he wants
to share with you.)

  “What PhD must ask herself is whether the arrangement that she is contemplating with such cool and disinterested calculation is truly one that will end in her having acquired the knowledge for which she longs. There would be no passion in this relationship; those are the terms on which this affair would be conducted. Nothing transformative would occur, with each self remaining firmly in possession of itself. Again, those are the terms on which this affair would be conducted.

  “But PhD should consider whether these very terms preclude the possibility of attaining the good she desires. Wisdom is an extraordinary state. It requires experience sufficiently out of the ordinary to break the hold over us of our habitual ways of seeing and being, which are, in truth, ways of not fully seeing and not fully being.

  “There are those who have been granted genius—artistic, intellectual, spiritual1—and the extraordinary makes itself available to them in the sphere of their genius. But for those unvisited by genius’s spirit, there is only eros to break the heavy sleep of ordinary life and lead the way to the extraordinary. Eros wrenches the soul from its lazy reliance on conventions that substitute for sight. Gripped by the intensity of erotic longing, a person begins to know the world and its beauty. She knows the world is beautiful because it contains the one she loves. Neither human judiciousness nor divine madness can provide a human being with any greater good than that (Phaedrus 256b).

  “There is risk in approaching eros on these terms, but that is because any transformative experience carries risk. But so, too, is there risk in forcing eros to surrender to our ordinary calculations: it is the risk of never surrendering oneself to eros. These are the risks that PhD, yearning for knowledge, should consider.”