Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.

Barthes: A Lover's Discourse

Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse - Fragments, tr. Richard Howard; Hill and Wang, New York, 2010

A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition.  I found this a challenging book to get through.  It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book.  Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition.  I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views.  I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say.  I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.

I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book.  Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing.  I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy.  I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them.  It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative.  I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.

Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,

"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."

or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which

"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."

Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured.  Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:

"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse." 

Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.

Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.'  He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."



In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of

"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."

And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.  My language trembles with desire.

On pg 129  in IDENTIFICATIONS:

Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:

"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."  

 He goes on to say that:

"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture.  In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"

this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.  (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.

If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.

This is unlike the Ancient Greeks' conception of love, the androgyne.  Barthes refers several times to the idea of the androgyne as propounded by Plato/Socrates and Aristophanes.  This is an image and a concept that has stuck with me ever since we read The Symposium.  It's appealing to think that there is another out there who fills the missing bits in oneself - there's a inevitability and durability to that concept that can be reassuring when in the torment of the love gone wrong or faded away.  In I WANT TO UNDERSTAND pg 60, he reprises Zeus' command to Apollo to 

"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."

 - like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.

In UNION pg 226

"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."

Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."

He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships.  On pg 92  THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes

"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.

He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 

"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"

I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons.  He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way.  She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right.  I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned).  In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte.  On pg 128  in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:

"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over.  This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."

This isn't an analysis that resonates with me.  Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES

"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.  "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.  There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women.  He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast.  In DOMNEI pg 82

"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76

"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"

In GRADIVA pg 126

"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively.  Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."

The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:

"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."

This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker.  Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.

Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that

"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."

In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message').  It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance."  He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:

Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.

In JEALOUSY, pg 144

"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."

Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.

He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:

"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."

Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships.  If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.

I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth.  The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment.  Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.

In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,

the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.

In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time.  When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks: 

"Why is the viable a "Good Thing?  Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."

SOBRIA EBRIETAS

Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess".  He quotes a zen saying:

"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it.  Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections.  It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying.  I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.

Descartes: A Discourse of the Method

Rene Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in Science, transl. Ian Maclean, Oxford World's Classics, 2006, New York

We now jump to the 17th century - we'll have to go back to the 16th c. on Saturday the 27th for Bartolome de las Casas and Michel de Montaigne.  Rene Descartes was born near Tours on 31 March 1596.  He took a Licentiate in Law and lived in Paris, Holland and Stockhold, Sweden where he died on 11 February 1650.  He studied physics but abandoned this work when he learned of the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633.  This led him to publish a description of his new philosophy in the Discourse in 1637.  As a side note, the introduction mentions that Descartes was often reluctant to publish because he was very protective of his privacy.  He adopted Ovid's adage bene qui latuit, bene vixit (he who remains well hidden, lives well) though this may have been a necessary stategem to continue his philosophical explorations without publicly flouting the Church.

During Descartes' time, science meant the pursuit of knowledge based on nature.  It was also termed natural philosophy and explored an understanding of the world based on observations, cause and effect.      Much of the thinking at the time was based on Aristotelian philosophy. Though in this course we have read Plato - and from Phaedrus and the Symposium we got a glimpse into Socrates' method and philosophy, we did not read any of Aristotle's texts.  Many of the writers we have read since then based their method of thinking and reasoning on Aristotle and I'm finding a gap in my understanding by not having read anything yet about Aristotle (other than Annabel Lyon's novel, The Golden Mean, last year).  I won't be able to remedy this during the next couple of weeks but I will try to read something about or by Aristotle later on.

University studies at the time followed the tradition of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy).  Descartes started his schooling in the Jesuit system which was rigorously structured ('give me the child, and I will give you the man').  Students learned classical literature, history, drama as well as theology and philosophy, including natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics.  This time period is described in the intro as Counter-Reformation Europe (the Reformation being led by Luther and Calvin and the Counter-Reformation being the Catholic Churches efforts at reform especially in Spain and Italy).  Early on, Descartes became interested in deriving a method for scientific enquiry.  Descartes felt that the Aristotelian view of the world was unsatisfactory and he had planned to write a book setting out his world system, ambitiously entitled "The Universe".  He did not complete this work.  He does write that he is speaking without the benefit of divine inspiration.  His philosophic principles have been termed 'cartesianism'.  The adjective 'cartesian' is used in relation to his mechanistic philosophy.  His methods relied on "good sense' rather than a rigorous education and therefore was accessible to more people, including women (who usually did not receive equal formal education).

Descartes was a soldier for many years.  He had an annual income after his mother's death and was later able to travel and devote time to his intellectual and scientific work.  He spent several years in Paris during a fairly lax time, a period of "free philosophizing" though he remained steadfast in his personal religious beliefs (to the point of being willing to suppress 4 years of his own work when he thought the Roman Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo made the sun's movement an article of faith).  He did not seem narrow-minded and, though Catholic, he had many Protestant friends and lived much of his adult life in Protestant countries.  He was aware of the work of Bacon, the other writer we are considering this week, and of Montaigne whom we are discussing on Saturday 27th.

There are some medical aspects to Descartes work which, while interesting from an historical perspective, leave me cringing from a humane (in the 20th century meaning of the word) point of view.  He refers to reading William Harvey's (the father of circulation) book De motu cordis  about the movements of the heart and I hate to think how Harvey did his research.

As background for some of the issues and conflicts during the 16th and 17th centuries (which, since the 13th century considered problems reconciling the Catholic church's teachings with philosophic thinking (the nature of the soul, intellect and the individual, the origin and functioning of the universe).  These conflicts came to a head for Descartes in the trial and treatment of Galileo Galilei who espoused the truth of the new cosmology of the Copernican system (putting the sun as a still body at the centre of the galaxy with the earth as one of several planets revolving around the sun).  Though whole episode of Galileo and his work and the uproar it caused is intriguing - again, something to read more on when I have time.

The  Discourse is divided  into 6 parts, written at different times and places.
In part 1 .........
Good sense or reason = the power of judging correctly & of distinguishing the true from the false 
(pg 5, 1.2)

Descartes also said that good sense or reason is the only thing that makes us human and distinguishes us from brute beasts.  While I agree with his definition of reason, I don't agree that this is what makes us human.  Imagination and an awareness of the universe and of mortality are also part of what makes us human (but maybe that's part of the definition of Reason - I'm still sorting that one out).  Altruism may also be a human characteristic but there are cases of animals acting in unexplained ways that resemble altruism so I don't know about the exclusivity of that quality yet.

Diversity of opinion arises because we have different ways of directing our thoughts
For it is not enough to possess a good mind; the most important thing is to apply it correctly

(pg 6. 13)  His method involves 4 characteristics:

1. certainty in the distinction between truth and error
2. ease of application
3. fruitfulness
4. wisdom, or the production of true knowledge

Descartes wrote about the superior results obtained when one person creates or produces something.  He mentions the results of group effort looking more like "the product of chance than of the will of men applying their reason." (pg. 12, 2.13).  He writes about how we develop from birth, where we don't have "full use of our reason." (2.14) and the translator has added a note from a later work (Passions of the Soul) where will is described as 'rational appetite' and desire seems to be described as 'animal appetite'.  I'm not sure I would fully agree as there are desires or passions that seem unique to man, hate being one, envy another, as well as greed and vengeance.

Descartes uses a building metaphor to argue for a solid foundation to build upon, whether for a house or a body of knowledge and philosophy.  He says it would not be reasonable to tear cities down which grew up haphazardly and therefore are not ideal and he says he is not advocating to tear down states (overthrow them) nor the established order of teaching in schools but his argument seems contradicted by the example he quotes (of people having to demolish their houses to rebuild them due to insecure foundations) which he says convinced him not to advocate for tearing established institutions (like nations or states) down to their foundations.

He does go on to say that he feels the body politic is too large and established to make it advisable to tear it down, and that over time, any imperfections are corrected.

In Part 2, Descartes says that he feels a state is much better governed by a few laws that are strictly observed, and this is his basis for reducing his logical precepts to 4:

1. never to accept anything as true that I did not incontrovertibly know to be so;
2. divide all the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as many as were required to solve them in the best way;
3. conduct my thoughts in a given order beginning with the simplest and most easily understood [...] and gradually ascending , as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the most complex;
4. undertake such complete enumerations and general surveys that I would be sure to have left nothing out.

In Part 3, Descartes describes the provisional moral code he uses to guide himself while he is "tearing down to the foundations" his knowledge of the world and building or re-building his judgements.

1. Obey the laws and customs of my country and to adhere to the religion in which [I was instructed]
2. be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could
3. endeavour always to master myself rather than fortune, to try to change my desire rather than to change the order of the world, and in general to settle for the belief that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts
4. to devote my life to the cultivation of my reason and make such progress as I could in the knowledge of the truth following the method I had prescribed for myself

These moral precepts seemed very Aurelian, reminding me strongly of the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.  Descartes makes a good point that to know what someone's opinions really were he had to "take note of what they did rather than what they said," saying that "some do not even know what they believe." 

I have a bit of a problem , from a rational point of view, with his comment that "God has given each of us an inner light to distinguish true and false."  I'm not convinced this is true of everyone.  I don't know if it comes down to nurture rather than nature but it seems some people have more of an innate faculty or need for truth while some others seem to see truth as a device to fool others and thereby fulfill their desires.

He speaks about travelling for nine years, "trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the dramas that are played out on that [the world's] stage."

Descartes discourse is targeted to metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, physics and he wishes to allow for progress in medicine.  His method involves positing, the formulation of a hypothesis, consistent with general principles, which then needs to be tested against empirical observations.

Descartes says there is  no material aspect or locality to thinking.  He lists the mental faculties of reason, imagination, memory and speaks about a thinking substance.

I'm sure that throughout my master's I will find myself, as Descartes felt, "progressively revealing to myself how ignorant I was"  (pg. 7.4)

Just as a note of personal interest, Ian Maclean, the translator of the text we read, used the expression pis-aller in his intro.  I'd never heard this before but it means a fall-back position or option, 2nd choice, for lack of a better option etc.

pis-aller  Wiktionnaire: pis-aller

1. Pire qu’il puisse arriver, moindre avantage qu’on puisse avoir.
   • S’il ne réussit pas dans sa nouvelle carrière, son pis-aller sera de rentrer dans celle qu’il a quittée.
2. Quelque chose ou quelqu’un choisi faute de mieux, expédient, compromis bancal.
   • Les reboisements ne sont que des pis-allers qui ne remplaceront jamais la richesse naturelle de la forêt originelle.
   • Je ne veux pas être son pis aller, la personne à qui il s’adresse par défaut, faute d’avoir trouvé mieux.

Also a reference to St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, Ch. 13 that I've always liked (and was used again just recently when Justin Trudeau decided to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada).
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

Also solely of interest to me, the introduction refers to a letter where Descartes mentions he doesn't wish to have his Discourse printed by the prominent Dutch publishing house Elzeviers - interestingly one of the main medical publishers today is Elsevier. Founded in 1880 and based in Amsterdam, it is not related to Elzeviers but did take its name from them.

Plato's SYMPOSIUM

(Plato's Symposium, Tr. Christopher Gill, Penguin Classics, 1999)

(Plato's Symposium, Tr.Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff, Hackett, 1989)

I read Plato’s Phaedrus for our introductory text back in July.  Phaedrus was an innocuously thin book that I found surprisingly tough to read.  I started to read his Symposium with some trepidation but found it much more accessible.  The Symposium contains a series of speeches about Eros or Love.  A relaxed group of post-prandial Athenian intellectuals are lying on their couches in the andrôn or male section of the house, attended by slaves, drinking wine and making speeches.  I tried to picture the scene.  I wish I had had some familiarity with the Athens of Plato and Socrates’ time when I was in my 20s and exploring Athens during a month travelling around Greece.  I would have loved to have contemplated life back in the 5^th century as I wandered around the city.  I enjoyed this book with its glimpse into the male Athenian intellectual world of 400-500 BCE.  I’ve decided to summarize what each speaker had to say as an aid to keeping the various ideas straight.

The SPEAKERS

Phaedrus speaks about love as LOVE, Eros the ancient, insufficiently-venerated God of love.  Created 3^rd, after Chaos and Earth.  This love is the love of an older lover for a younger boy where “guidance” is imparted, leading to a good life.  This love stops men from acting shamefully for fear of appearing shameful in the loved one’s eyes; encouraging men to behave well.  He cites  the story of Alcestis who took Admetus’ (her husband’s) place in Hades to save his life (and so the gods gave Alcestis her soul back). Alcestis is held up as an example of the ‘courage of love’.  Her bravery and love are overshadowed however by Achilles’ action in avenging his doomed lover Patroclus.  Because Achilles was the beloved rather than the lover, his sacrifice was considered nobler, and as reward, the gods sent him to the Isles of the Blest.

Phaedrus’ conclusion is that Love is the most powerful of the gods in helping men gain virtue and blessedness.

Pausanias, lover of Agathon, spoke next.  He discussed Aphrodite (companion of Love/Eros) as being 2 goddesses: ‘Heavenly’ Aphrodite, motherless daughter of Uranus who because of this purely male descent, “finds pleasure in what is by nature stronger and more intelligent.”  This Aphrodite is an older goddess and “free from the lewdness of youth”, preferring older boys who “have begun to form minds of their own.”  The relationship of an older lover to such a boy is not founded in deceit, but is about the imparting of knowledge, guidance – and is more enduring.  This speech seems a bit self-serving in its idealizing of the actual relationship of Pausanias and Agathon.

 ‘   'Common’ Aphrodite’s love “is truly common”.  It’s the love of an older man for young boys, or for women, “to the body more than the soul”.  This younger Aphrodite “partakes of the nature both of the female and the male” – hence vulgar.

      Pausanias groups philosophy, sport and Love together – as leading to ambition or bonds of friendship which is why he says Love is condemned by Rulers in their “lust for power”.  To be honorable, Pausanias feels that love should be openly declared.  He feels love is complex and that its character (honorable or shameful) “depends entirely on the behaviour it gave rise to.”

While Pausanias’ speech seems a bit pompous, he does support love of character rather than physical beauty.  Love of beauty “is bound to be inconstant, since what [is] love[d] is itself mutable and unstable.  The moment the body is no longer in bloom, “he flies off and away,” his promises and vows in tatters behind him.  How different from this is a man who loves the right sort of character, and who remains its lover for life, attached as he is to something that is permanent.”  Pausanias goes on to describe the only way in which these honorable love affairs should be conducted, a narrow viewpoint that has not held up 2500 years later.

Eryximachus spoke next.  He was a medical doctor and his speech addressed love from a corporal point of view.  He contended that our bodies “manifest the two species of Love.”  “Good” love is like good health and “bad” love is like disease in a body.

“The physician’s task is to effect a reconciliation and establish mutual love between the most basic bodily elements.”

He saw conflict within the body: between hot and cold, bitter and sweet, wet to dry; and he refers back to Asclepius as being the first to learn how to reconcile these opposing elements. 

Eryximachus extends this theory of the reconciling of opposites to music, with harmony being produced when high and low notes are brought into agreement.

Fourth to speak was Aristophanes who wove a beguiling myth about the original 3 kinds of human beings: male-male (offspring of the sun), female-female (offspring of the earth) and male-female (offspring of the moon).  These original beings had 4 hands and legs, 2 faces etc.  The gods decided to punish them after the humans attempt to “make an ascent to heaven” – an event very reminiscent of God’s punishment for the hubris of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.  In this myth however, instead of sowing linguistic confusion and scattering mankind to the 4 corners of the earth, the gods cut each human being in two.  Most fascinating in this was the description of Apollo drawing all the skin into a pouch with a drawstring, forming the navel.

Aristophanes’ myth proposes that love is the attempt by each human being to find and reunite with their separated half – a very appealing (though limiting) idea.

Agathon spoke next and his theory of love is that Eros or Love is the happiest, most beautiful and best of the gods.  “Love was born to hate old age.”  Not a very inspiring viewpoint for the Zoomer generation.  Agathon posits that Love “makes his home in the characters, in the souls, of gods and men.”  He goes on to describe Love’s moral character which is comprised of justice, moderation, wisdom and ‘manly bravery’.

In Agathon’s words, Love

Gives peace to men and stillness to the sea,

Lays winds to rest, and careworn men to sleep.

His view of Love also seemed constrained and limiting but without the appeal of Aristophanes' myth.

Socrates spoke last of those present.  He described how a speaker should construct their speech, at 198d:

“In my foolishness, I thought you should tell the truth about whatever you praise, that this should be your basis, and that from this a speaker should select the most beautiful truths and arrange them most suitably.”

He began by questioning Agathon and showing him where he has erred in logic in his speech.  He then recounted a discussion he had with a foreign priestess, Diotima, who taught him about love.  Socrates argues that Love is the desire for “good things” or for happiness and to have them forever.  Diotima described a myth about Love: a child of Necessity and Poverty, conceived on the day of Aphrodite’s birth and therefore her companion, lover of the beautiful since Aphrodite was beautiful, lover of wisdom.  Love is described as poor, resourceful, a schemer and great hunter: “brave, impetuous and intense.”

Diotima/Socrates ends by saying that what Love wants is reproduction in beauty and hence immortality.

A final speaker appears when Alcibiades arrives late and very drunk.  His speech focuses on Socrates and he describes him as both a man, ugly and unappealing on the outside, and a sage with many good qualities such as courage, endurance, wisdom on the inside; comparing him to the statue of Silenus which though ugly and base on the outside, opened to show beautiful idols inside.  Alcibiades’ speech goes on to describe Socrates as the beloved rather than the lover and then shows that Socrates loved beauty and wisdom.  He quotes Socrates as saying, at 218c, “You’re trying to get true beauty [Socrates’ wisdom or philosophical ideas] in return for its appearance [beautiful young boy].”

What was appealing to me about Alcibiades' eulogy of Socrates and of Love, was that though he started by ridiculing Socrates’ appearance and his role as aged lover of beautiful young boys, he ended up praising his understanding and wisdom, his integrity.

“If you’re prepared to listen to Socrates’ discussions, they seem absolutely ridiculous at first. … But if you can open them up and see inside, you’ll find they’re the only ones that make any sense. … They range over most – or rather all – of the subjects that you must examine if you’re going to become a good person.”

When I think about the topics for this course, Reason and Passion, I find both present throughout the Symposium.  The entire book is about Eros, love or desire, and discusses the passions that motivate and torment men but also as a path to beauty or the divine. The book is a constructed as a series of speeches attempting to present a point of view and persuade the listener, usually by reason and logic, of the truth of the speaker’s viewpoint.