60 in 60: #23 - Plato's The Symposium (Penguin's Great Ideas)

This blog post is part of my ongoing "60 Books in 60 Days" encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series--the Guardian's book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin's page about the books.The Symposiumby Plato (429-347 BC)Memorable Line"Socrates sat down and said, ‘How splendid it would be, Agathon, if wisdom was the sort of thing that could flow from the fuller to the emptier of us when we touch each other, like water, which flows through a piece of wool from a fuller cup to an emptier one."The SkinnyA surprisingly rich, entertaining, and funny book of conversations between Socrates and his friends on a variety of fundamental subjects, including love, death, and truth. (Although some of it may make modern readers uncomfortable.)Relevance? Argument?Imagine you meet up with some of your buddies, including S and you all decide to go over to your friend A's house to drink and talk all night long. It's so much fun, and includes so much interesting, unpretentious conversation, that one of you decided later to write it all down in a semi-informal way.Well, that's what Plato's "The Symposium" is like, except "S" isn't Sam or Stephen or Sandra, but Socrates, "A" isn't Andy but Agathon, the party includes such ancients as Aristodemus and Eryximachus, and you're in Greece a few hundred years before the birth of Christ. The amiable pace of "The Symposium," its sly way of making the reader comfortable, seems like a truly radical idea to me, given how many of these Great Ideas books--from Schopenhauer to Freud and beyond--begin and end with the ideas, without the transcript of what led to them."Hey, the man from Phalerum! You! Apolodorus, won't you wait?"..."Don't make fun of me, just tell me when the party took place." "Come on, why don't you repeat this to me now? After all, walking down the road to the city gives us a good chance to talk and listen as we go along." And thus Plato relates the story of the party with Socrates and a bevy of other ancients.At first, it seemed frivolous just because it was so shocking compared to the other readings, but there's a kind of generosity and sense of fun in this approach that makes the philosophical discussion at the core of "The Symposium" much more palatable--Plato has found the perfect delivery system for the reader. (I thought: Imagine if Freud could've had a figurative Schopenhauer on his couch, and vice versa, and they transcribed the conversations--"the will is but my id!"--with a few contextual details about the decor of the room, what they drank, etc.)Plato's approach is especially useful--although he couldn't have known it--to the modern reader who might recoil from a statement like: "Those who are cut from the male gender go for males. While they are boys, because they are slices of the male gender, they are attracted to men and enjoy sleeping with men and being embraced by them. These are the best of their generation, both as boys and young men, because they are naturally the bravest. Some people say that they are shameless, but that isn't true." The recoiling comes not from the thought of a same sex relationship, but from the idea of sexual contact between minors and adults being actively encouraged.Another disturbing element to the text, less codified but just as prevalent: an assumption that women are weak and lesser, despite a few kudos thrown their way. These two elements made some of the discussion seem more like that between deranged fratboys in hell than philosophers. At the same time, they're very serious about boy-man love--if you divorce the discussion from the subject and think about it in general terms, their thoughts on love are very interesting. There's a kind of innocence to statements like "...what I'm saying applies to all men and all women, too: our human race can only achieve happiness if love reaches its conclusion, and each of us finds his loved one and restores his original nature."As the participants agree, mostly through the soliloquies of Agathon, that courage and justice cannot stand up to the power of love, the reader comes to realize, too, that these attributes had physical manifestations in the form of the Greek gods. Still, the conversation often seems to come with an assumption that the gods should not be taken literally--or that the relevant gods so inhabit their domains that the god of love, for example, may only truly manifest through exhibitions of love.The essential lovability of the participants seems confirmed by such affirmations as Socrates saying, "My good friend, how can I fail to be lost for words, or anyone else, who has to follow such a beautiful and varied speech? The rest was not quite so amazing; but who could fail to be struck by the beauty of language and phrasing at the end. I saw that I couldn't even get close to this degree of beauty in my speech, and was so ashamed I nearly ran away." Somehow, I cannot imagine this kind of praise on the internet these days, and it made me quite fond of Socrates--indeed, of the whole group. Socrates is, just possibly, about to hand Agathon his ass, and yet he is going to do so in a spirit of collegial high spirits and love.But because Socrates isn't a mean person, he just snips off Agathon's argument at the point at which it failed for him--"My dear Agathon, I thought you made a good start to your speech, when you said we should bring out Love's character before turning to the effects he produces"--and heads off into new territory: proving the multiplicative properties of love, pointing out that those who have love still yearn for love, if only for their future self (just as one who is strong still seeks strength, despite their present condition), and in the most agreeable way moves the conversation to both more abstract and more concrete levels.From there, the book enters into a delightful spiral of thoughts and ideas about love, spurred on by Socrates' inquisitiveness. For some reason by this point I had it in my mind that they were all lounging on the lawn of the mythical college in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, wearing boater hats and light-colored suits and sipping from agreeable drinks, having the time of their lives. I even thought, for a second, that if Woolf had ambled along, they might have invited her into their company. Might, in fact, have welcomed it. This is the effect Plato's friendly, informal tone created--to the point that they could've been discussing the etiquette of unblocking storm drains and I would've read on, and read on.This is also the difficulty of summarizing a book that is a conversation, whether on a blog or more patient medium: when you do, the words become more like diamonds, sharper and compressed, losing the essential generosity that gave them life.Conclusion(1) The Greeks used their leisure time well. (2) Neal Stephenson has probably hidden parts of this discussion in a 900-page maze somewhere.Question for ReadersWhat is your fondest memory of a deep and fond discussion among friends, the kind that lasts until morning? Spill the beans.Next up, Lucretius's Sensation and Sex...