DISCUSSION Plato's Symposium and Sappho's poems and fragments

We had our 2^nd class yesterday and discussed Plato’s Symposium and Sappho’s poems and fragments.  Though Plato’s book was all about Eros (love and desire) and contained no less than 7 separate speeches about Eros, the few poems and scraps of Sappho's poetry that have survived make you FEEL passion, love, desire.  The dominant motif of Plato’s work was Reason and the dominant motif in all Sappho’s words is PASSION.

Roberta led the discussion on Sappho.  Prior to the class and leading right up to the class, she had tweeted fragments from Sappho which was a fun way to read some fragments and think about them individually. We had a round table session where we each read a fragment and tried to be aware of what our immediate sensation was after hearing Sappho’s words.  Everyone seemed to have enjoyed her poetry.  When we got into a later discussion about what some of the fragments might have meant, it became bogged down for me in discussions of how literally to interpret the following 2 fragments:

“and for you I make an offering

of a white goat”

(which sounded to me like something Leonard Cohen might have written)

“Sweet mother, I can no longer work the loom.

Slender Aphrodite has made me fall in love with a boy.”

This is one of those situations where the words themselves are enough for me without analyzing it too closely but at the same time, it would be interesting to find out more about that time, what the rites would have been to worship Aphrodite, gender roles, people's relationships with the gods they worshipped – not to flesh out the poem itself but just to delve into a world I know nothing about.

It was very interesting to read Plato’s Symposium on Eros the same week we read Sappho’s work.  Someone mentioned that several speakers in the Symposium note that Eros is a neglected god whom no one has written about but Plato does not mention Sappho, a Greek poet from 2 centuries earlier who would certainly have been known in Athens in Plato’s (and Socrates’) time.  The two texts were such distinct examples of Passion vs Reason with the additional irony that Plato’s logical discussions were on the subject of Eros: Love or Desire, yet compared to Sappho, his work lacked passion.

Byron led the discussion on the Symposium.  There were several interesting themes in this work which we had a chance to discuss.

One was a brief discussion of Plato’s Theory of Forms:

There exist out there in the universe forms for everything that are the perfect versions – people may get a glimpse of these perfect forms and then once you’ve seen it you’ll never be satisfied with the imperfect forms i.e.: love is not just sexual satisfaction, it’s also a beautiful ideal.

I wasn’t aware of this theory before and don’t really have a good understanding of the concept – again something I would like to read more about when I get the chance.

We discussed the idea that what we see is not necessarily what really is – you have to work at things as they are not necessarily what they 1^st appear.  This, in my limited understanding of Socrates, seems to sum up his method: to challenge the other person on what they think they know and by questioning them and discussing their ideas, show them that their understanding is imperfect BUT help them towards a better understanding through the discussion.

We also discussed one of the recurrent themes: duality.  The speeches contained many examples where things were mentioned and categorized into 2 opposing categories:

Heavenly Aphrodite/Common Aphrodite

Young/old

Good love/vulgar love

Wisdom/Ignorance

Health/Disease

Lover/Beloved

Male/Female

Sappho by contrast did not seem to use duality in her work.  It's more centered on the person, the connection, the passion, the natural world around her.

Socrates speech was interesting as Diotima brings in the idea of a spectrum – that extremes aren’t the entire story – many people fall in the middle (the “enlightened” people?)

202a – Diotima (Haven’t you realized that there is something between wisdom and ignorance?)

“It’s having right opinions without being able to give reasons for having them” –

There are also some devastating characterizations in Plato's speeches:

204a  “The problem with the ignorant person is precisely that, despite not being good or intelligent, he regards himself as satisfactory.”

We also discussed the question of whether we should be concerned about the intention or the act.  Several speakers in the Symposium had touched on this, most notably Pausanias.  This issue is still debated to this day.  I remember seeing “Oleanna” a play by David Mamet which contrasts an interaction between a professor and a young female student from each of their viewpoints and suggests that judgment of an action or of someone's words depends more on how it is perceived than on how it was intended by the speaker.

The question of intention also comes up in the murder trials where the intent has a huge impact on the punishment: 1^st degree murder vs manslaughter.  Similarly with state-sanctioned killing: war, self-defense, terrorism etc.

Byron asked “How strange is it that Socrates stands still for extended lengths of time, presumably lost in thought? What would happen today if someone did this? Is this lost in thought or some form of dissociation?”  The answers brought up the theory of the bicameral mind again and how we define mental illness.  For me this brings us back to Diotoma’s spectrum.  Every time I hear about a new mental illness being defined and making it into  the latest edition of the “Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", I can’t help but think that all of us could find ourselves somewhere on many of these spectra, that we are just defining variations on normal human conditions.

We ended our discussion by talking about immortality.  During Socrates’ speech the purpose of life seemed to be immortality and this is achieved through 'reproduction in beauty', suggesting that we should be pursuing truth, beauty, good and that the path to this was through philosophy.  We spoke about the ways of trying to achieve immortality, each containing some kind of flaw:

• procreational (via children) - the problem was that over time your line could die out, or even if it didn’t, who would remember you generations down ?  In modern scientific terms however, your genetic material would survive.

• reputational – either through history (figures such as Alexander the Great) or through surviving written works such as philosophy or literature, or works of art.  The question then becomes how well do you want to be remembered to consider you have achieved immortality: 

1. just your name, 
2. your work without your name (such as an anonymous creator of some Etruscan vase in a museum somewhere), 
3. having future generations know your work but nothing about you, such as Lucretius (coming up in a couple of weeks), to know about you but mainly misinformation such as Richard III, maligned by Shakespeare and known by today’s world as a hunchback, tyrant and murderer of children.  This is very topical today as archaeologists excavate on Grey Friars Street in Leicester, hoping to find the lost grave of Richard the III.

For me immortality would be best achieved by creating something that retained its significance and power centuries later, such as Sappho did.