Episode 100: Plato’s Symposium Live Celebration!

0:00 Mark Linsenmayer: Welcome to the big show. Wanted to let you know that you can choose to see this show in video form. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to find the link. Thanks and enjoy the show. All right, last one and then we're going to have our special guest, philosophy bro read some stuff from his site, philosophybro.com or something else that he's come up with because he's a singular genius who has put this thing out in the world that is even more popular than partial, examined life. So get up there while we're sitting, while we're doing that. This is called. It's a song about ontology. Nothing in this world but you.

0:48 Mark Making Music: Sometimes after failure has hit you again and you can't keep on working for art or for pleasure because indulging yourself just doesn't hold your interest and there's not much to know that doesn't keep fading and after your aims have been thoroughly trounced and you don't really think they were worthwhile anyway, you'll be looking for someone to fill up that hole Something worth waking up for. Do what I do. Praise be to you I live only for love enduring there's nothing in this world but you Nothing in my world but you I'm betting all my energy that you won't be wrong for me there's nothing in this world but you Nothing left but me and you Nothing left to motivate or even to make me real I don't think you'll go for pasta prosperity it's not worth it, it's not worth it.

I don't think you'll put all your stakes on your friends though that's a little closer to the heart. I know you can't stomach some Jesus or goddess and immersion in politics is like dining with idiots Something that can't be kept up long. I know you want money but not that much I know you can't feel with a casual touch you got no ADD I know of so baby, please consider me after the madness of now goes away Whatever you're doing whenever you pray and even if you never feel as crummy as I often do do what I do Praise be to you I live only for love endearing there's nothing in this world but Nothing in this world but you I'm betting all my energy that you won't be wrong for me there's nothing in this world but you Nothing left but me and you Nothing left to motivate or even to make me real.

Oh, oh oh oh, oh, oh Sam,

4:15 Philosophy: How's it going, everyone? Welcome to Partially Examined Life Live. As Mark said, I'm a singular genius. You may know me as Philosophy bro. I'm honored to be here for the 100th episode of Partially Examined Life. Give it up for 100 episodes.

4:34 Mark Making Music: Yeah,

4:38 Philosophy: we're going to be reading the Symposium by Plato, which I'm thrilled about because it's the broiest of Plato's works. And not just because of the homoeroticism, though, that plays. I'm not going to read you my translation straightforwardly of the Apology, but I want to talk about the apology because that's the other big Platonic dialogue where Socrates personality comes through. I mean, he's a dick in everything that he writes or that he's featured in, but the apology is where he's been put on trial for corrupting the youth and for being impious and not worshiping the gods.

And in classic Socratic fashion, he. He doesn't really defend himself in the traditional sense of saying, I. I'm not guilty of those things. What he does is he gets up and he says, like, well, I'm like a million years old and I've never been here in court before, so I'm just gonna do my thing. Which is how every Socratic dialogue starts. Like, hey, I'm just gonna be Socrates for a while. If you could be cool with that. Like, it's gonna be great. Everyone's like, yeah, that's okay. All you, bud. And so he gets him. He says, I'm just gonna be Socrates.

I'm gonna defend myself. The thing is, everyone seems to think, like, oh, Socrates, he thinks he's so great, but really, I don't think I'm that great at all. All that happened is I went to the Oracle and. And the Oracle is like, socrates, you're the smartest person. And I'm like, well, Oracle, I'm not one to question, like, the mouth of the gods on Earth. But that doesn't seem like I'm the smartest person on Earth. Let me see if I can find someone smarter than me. And that way I won't just be like, the oracle's wrong. It can be like, the oracle's wrong.

It's Dave that's the smartest person. So I went around to everyone and I was like, hey, you seem to know a lot of things. Politicians. And that went as well as you expected. And then I went to, like, artisans, and I was like, you guys make cool shit. You probably know other things too, right? And they're like, yeah, I know lots of stuff. I made a chair. And also, I know about the meaning of life. But they didn't. So that didn't go great. And then I went to lawyers, and they were just still also the politicians, so that wasn't great either. So the problem is that I haven't found anyone else who knows anything.

And I think the only reason the oracle thinks I'm very smart is because I know I don't know shit, and the rest of you don't know shit. But you're all like, look at me. I know shit, and you don't. So that was, like, the thrust of his defense. And then he calls his prosecutor up. He's like, hey, come up here. I've got some questions. No. Yeah, you. You wanted to be the guy who murdered Socrates. Here's your chance, big guy. Get up here. So he calls this guy up and he's like, so there are two charges. Corrupting the youth and being impious. And he's like, okay, so first charge, you're saying, I corrupt the youth.

Well, what's good for the youth? And the guy's like, well, the jury. The jury's cool people. They're good for the youth. And he's like, yeah, good. And the laws. And Meletus is like, yeah, the laws. And Socrates is like. And other Athenians and the whole city. And Meletus is like, yeah, all that shit. You're all great. Vote for the prosecution. And Socrates is like, so what you're saying is literally everyone in Athens is good for the youth except for me. And Meletus is like, yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying. Everyone. Everyone but you. And Socrates is like, great, you're doing great.

So the other thing is, you're saying I'm corrupting people. Let me ask you, someone surrounds himself with corrupted things. How are things gonna go for that person? And the guy's like, yeah, not super good. I mean, like, if a horse surrounded himself with people who didn't know anything about horses, that would be bad for the horse, right? And Meletus is like horses. Yes. Yes, that would be true. And, like, if a lyricist surrounded himself with people who are terrible at music, that would be bad for the. For the lyricist. And he'd be like, yeah, his lyrics would go just way down.

He wouldn't be very good at that at all. And Socrates is like, so what you're saying is, I'm surrounding myself with people that I'm turning into assholes. And Meletus is like, yeah, I guess that's what I'd have to be saying, isn't it? Yeah. And Socrates is like, but, you know that'd be bad for me, right? Meletus is like, yeah, I don't know why you're doing it either. I don't know why you're putting assholes everywhere, but you totally are. And then the last one is the charge of impiousness. And Socrates is like, so you're saying, I don't believe in gods, right.

But I believe in other spiritual things. And Meletus is like, yes, yeah, this is the big one that I'm going for. This is what I want the death penalty for. You don't believe in the gods, you believe in other spiritual shit. And Socrates, he does this thing where, like, he just says a definition because whoever he's talking to can't come up with a better definition. They're like, fucking, yeah, let's go with your thing, Socrates. And Socrates is like, so your spirits, right? They would have to be either the gods or children of gods, right? And Meletus is like, yeah, that.

Yes, let's say spirits are that. Because who knows what spirits actually are? And Socrates like, well, so you're saying, I believe in children of gods, but not gods. That doesn't work, does it? And it's like, fuck, I shouldn't have let you talk. Oh, you've gotten 180 on me. And then Socrates is like. He makes him sit down and he says, so. People ask me, like, why didn't you just apologize? He's like, because fuck that. I am doing what I think is the right thing to do. I'm just going to do me, and all I can do is me. And then if you don't like that, too bad.

But I'm not going to live a lie. I'm not going to live a lie for some hypothetical juror who isn't happy about me. And this is Socrates just being himself. And then the time comes to ask for, like, the verdict, and the jury votes. Like, we were on his side, and then he was just a huge dick about it to everyone. So they give a guilty verdict. And then in Athens, after a guilty verdict, he would say, like, all right, I'm guilty. Here's what my punishment should be. And so Meletus gets up and he's like, yeah, death, that's my thing. Thanks. I'm Meletus.

And he has a seat, and Socrates gets up and he's like, well, now I have to tell you what I think I deserve. And his friends are like, fucking, please Socrates, just say, like, exile. Just be cool about it. Socrates, like, I think I deserve a parade. I still don't think I did anything wrong. It doesn't have to be like a parade through the streets. It could be like a party with cake. I'd be fine with that. But other than that, I think that's pretty much what I deserve.

10:41 Mark Making Music: And then.

10:42 Philosophy: And then the judge is going to be like, all right, everyone decide what his punishment should be, whether it should be death or a party. And everyone was like, fucking. We were so ready to vote for anything but death. That wasn't a party. We didn't want to vote for death. But the only thing we want to vote for less than death is a party. And so Socrates got the death penalty because the option, the only out he gave the jurors was, was cake. And I think you'll see through the symposium that that personality of Socrates also really shining through. This is just. The symposium is a bunch of bros getting really drunk. Like, really drunk and talking about love because ancient Greece. And with that, the sympos.

11:39 Mark Linsenmayer: You are viewing the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point thought about doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Except for that guy who got a physics PhD and then didn't want to do physics anymore and then taught philosophy for a while, but then didn't do that anymore. And this guy who actually is a philosophy professor but has a real language. Am I not allowed to say that?

12:03 Philosophy: Do we know that?

12:03 Mark Linsenmayer: We don't know that. And we don't know his last name, but I know his first name, but we'll try not to say it.

12:11 Wes: You certainly don't look old enough to be a philosophy professor.

12:14 Philosophy: That's probably true. Who knows why that is us.

12:18 Mark Linsenmayer: Our topic for episode 100 is Plato's Symposium. You know that how many people looked at it before they got here? That's a majority.

12:28 Wes: Well, looked at. It is very low.

12:31 Philosophy: You waved it.

12:31 Wes: I looked at it.

12:32 Philosophy: You waved at it.

12:33 Seth: How many people read this summary at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Okay,

12:40 Wes: People actually read it.

12:41 Seth: They actually read it.

12:43 Mark Linsenmayer: All right, let's. For the people that are not familiar. In fact, my kids are here somewhere. They're outside.

12:47 Wes: Right?

12:48 Mark Linsenmayer: Can you hear me? Abe and Mina Kim, can you hear me?

12:52 Wes: Hello?

12:53 Seth: No, thank you.

12:53 Mark Making Music: No. All right.

12:54 Wes: Shouldn't we say it was working before?

12:56 Philosophy: We are.

12:56 Mark Linsenmayer: Oh, this is Mark Linsenmayer, and I'm sitting in the Craftsman tap and table in Middleton, Wisconsin.

13:02 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, and I'm also sitting at the Craftsman Tap and Table in Middleton, Wisconsin.

13:06 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and Ditto what they just said.

This is Dylan Casey, also at Craftsman Table and Tap.

13:12 Philosophy: This is Philosophy bro from an undisclosed location.

13:17 Seth: The underground bunker.

13:18 Wes: Yeah.

13:20 Mark Linsenmayer: And now all of you, introduce yourself. No, actually, I know that I was busy futzing with sound stuff before.

13:27 Seth: I am.

13:27 Mark Linsenmayer: But, you know, we're gonna be hang around for at least an hour after we're done here, and we want to meet everybody. So introduce yourselves and then we'll maybe recognize you when you email us something in Eng.

13:37 Wes: And we know a lot of you traveled for quite a ways to get here, so thanks all of you for coming out. It's really awesome.

13:42 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, we should also introduce. So Josh Casey, Dylan's brother, is our sound engineer, Glenn Luce. Austin is our video guy. Our frequent guest, Daniel Horne, who was on episode 99 with us that we recorded last night. He's been on the Kierkegaard episode, on several other ones. Schleiermacher.

13:57 Philosophy: All.

13:57 Mark Linsenmayer: All the popular episodes. The Schleiermachers.

14:00 Mark Making Music: And.

14:01 Wes: And he'll be live social media management.

14:04 Mark Linsenmayer: Yes, yes. About half the time. If you interact with us on Twitter, you are dealing with Daniel. The other part, you're dealing with Seth.

14:10 Philosophy: What's up?

14:12 Mark Linsenmayer: So you guys know him already?

14:14 Philosophy: I know him better than I know you. For now.

14:18 Mark Linsenmayer: The people you don't know so well are. Are people like Phaedrus and Pausanias. So we each turn it around.

14:27 Mark Making Music: Turn it around.

14:28 Mark Linsenmayer: So now we're actually. We're not going to play at this. This is not a. This is not one of those kind of things, but we did feel. So this is a long dialogue, and it's not the typical Socratic dialogue where it's just Socrates and a bunch of dumbasses who say, yes, Socrates. Yes, Socrates. It's at a drinking party and they're taking turns. They're supposed to give speeches in praise of Eros and Eros. Why are they there, though? They're there to drink.

14:53 Wes: They're there for a party of Agathon because Agathon won the competition for the best play.

14:59 Mark Linsenmayer: See, Agathon's always calling attention himself.

15:05 Wes: So. And it's actually the second night of this party, so the night before they had a huge party. Everybody got completely drunk. And one of the features of these drinking parties is that people would drink until extreme excess and they would challenge each other to drink. It was basically a fraternity party.

Toga.

15:20 Dylan: Toga party.

15:21 Wes: A toga party. And they all agree that they've had too much to drink the night before, and they cannot stand to drink as much as they did the night before. So they're not going to force each other to drink. They're only going to drink as much as they feel like drinking.

15:35 Mark Linsenmayer: And then like, that's an advantage, which

15:37 Wes: is always a recipe for sobriety and moderation.

15:41 Mark Making Music: And then.

15:42 Wes: And Socrates was not there the night before. He decided to stay away, but he felt compelled to come on the second night. The other thing about the beginning of this dialogue is the whole dialogue is told from the point of view of someone telling Apollodorus, talking to Apollodorus, who. We don't know who this person is. Maybe it's Glaucon. We're not sure that it is Name drop.

16:08 Philosophy: There are rules.

16:09 Mark Making Music: There are no rules. There are no rules today.

16:11 Philosophy: I apologize.

16:12 Wes: There are no rules today. You guys want the rules are enough.

16:15 Philosophy: That doesn't matter.

16:16 Wes: We don't know who the guy is. But the point is that the.

There's a frame.

There's a frame for the dialogue in that some of the dialogues start off clearly being in the third person, but this one starts off in the first person. And that person is relating a story that was told to him by the person that went with Socrates, who heard it from his.

16:37 Mark Linsenmayer: I think it was a dream that his dog had, something like that.

16:41 Wes: Because the dog was there who heard it from the lute girl.

It's extreme hearsay.

Yes, it's extreme hearsay. So instead of drinking all night and just getting completely drunk and the lute girls and the whole nine yards, they decide that they're going to just hang out and they need to have something to occupy themselves. And Phaedrus decides, well, why don't we have speeches to praise the God that never gets praised, which is Eros, the

17:13 Mark Linsenmayer: God of love, except. So Eros, I had read that was. It's appetite, really. And in fact it was used, you know, not too far in the. In the past compared to these characters, as just even appetite for food. And so it's really.

17:27 Wes: But it's also appetite for what you expect.

17:28 Mark Linsenmayer: It's appetite. Right.

17:29 Mark Making Music: Well, so by this time it really.

17:31 Mark Linsenmayer: The meaning had gotten focused on. But it's very visceral. You see something beautiful and you want it. So that's what Eros is. Which is. So that's a little different than Aphrodite, you know, so there's. There's questions and one of the cupidity or.

17:46 Wes: Cupid.

17:47 Mark Linsenmayer: Yes, yeah, Cupid. So there's no. There's no talk of arrows and little babies flying around, right?

17:52 Wes: No, that's later on.

17:54 Mark Linsenmayer: But in any case. And one of the ambiguities in here is that there are no capital letters in ancient Greek. And so it's unclear from. From moment to moment whether talking about Eros, the thing that we all experience, lust and. Or Eros, the actual God, capital E, Eros, we would distinguish those. Those people wouldn't distinguish those. In fact, that was kind of a common thing, a way of talking about gods, that gods are imminent in experience, that you could talk about, you know, war as being Aries, like Ares is among us, or the spirit of Dionysus is among us when we're all getting drunk.

18:24 Wes: Well, we know he's done the background research, so. Yeah, so you set the frame.

18:31 Mark Making Music: Yeah.

18:31 Wes: So that's the beginning. The other interesting thing about that symposium and Mark alluded to this earlier is that it really is a play in a way that the other dialogues aren't. That there's a lot of ancillary action going on. And for instance, one of the things that happens, besides this being told from several points removed, is that there's this whole walk up that Socrates has. He walks up to Agathon's house and when he gets there, he's going in with Aristodemus, who. Aristodemus wasn't invited, but Socrates finds him on the street and drags him along.

And then when he gets there, he gets to the door of the house and he stays on the porch. Socrates does, he says, and Aristodemus has to go in, and he's embarrassed because he actually isn't invited. And Agathon says, oh, come on in, we're having a party. Where's Socrates? He said, he's out on the porch. And he says, well, well, go get him. Don't disturb him. He likes to stay out on the porch. He'll come in when he's ready. So he stayed out on the porch for the whole beginning of the party, just in reverie, thinking.

19:33 Mark Linsenmayer: Seems like a neurotic cat.

19:35 Wes: Well, so this comes around later on.

Or he's a poser.

Well, it comes around later on. We'll talk about the end of the dialogue is that one of the characters relates a story that this is what he used to do during battle, like in between the battles, he would go out and just sit around and just

19:51 Mark Linsenmayer: start thinking in between the battles, not just charge. And then he's like, wait a second, I'm gonna.

19:57 Wes: Yeah, so.

19:58 Philosophy: So.

19:58 Wes: Which is not to say you know, I'm not gonna go to the front lines.

That's right.

To complete.

20:03 Mark Making Music: Yes.

20:03 Wes: He was also kicked ass in battle.

Yeah, well, and we'll get.

And then he did.

We'll get to that. He's the greatest drinker, the greatest warrior,

the greatest philosopher, paragon of virtue.

20:12 Seth: Yes.

20:13 Wes: And drinking is part of that.

Yes. He can drink and never get drunk as much as possible.

20:18 Philosophy: But.

20:19 Wes: So then Socrates comes in and one thing you should imagine is that this is a room with a whole bunch of couches arranged around in a circle. And they're all good, like almost like at a table, but they're going to. They're getting food and they're drinking and they're talking in a conversation.

20:36 Mark Linsenmayer: It seems very awkward. You're like leaning on one arm and then you have to scoop food off of a table in front of you.

20:42 Wes: It's also.

20:42 Mark Linsenmayer: I thought we requested that in the venue. But they didn't get. They didn't have the couches.

20:47 Wes: I also have trouble imagining it without the lute girl. That's. Did we explain the lute girl?

They banned the lute girl. That's all they need to know.

20:54 Mark Linsenmayer: So that's a normal. It represents the explanation of the female from the.

20:59 Wes: No, let's not down, please.

21:04 Mark Linsenmayer: As in a.

21:05 Wes: No, it is a flute, not a lute girl. Although we had this discussion.

21:08 Mark Linsenmayer: Some instrument that doesn't exist anymore.

21:10 Wes: In some translations they've said lute. Or was that just a. That's an artifact of our drunken conversation last night. Flute became lute.

21:18 Seth: Yes. It should be noted that in order to provide the most authentic. Last night we had our own drinking and conversation, and today I am only having as much as I want.

21:37 Wes: So Socrates comes in, he sits next to Agathon in this room. And what they're going to do in these speeches, they're going to go around the room in order giving speeches. It's a little bit of a competition who's going to give the best. Next best one. And so Socrates, in the order right now is last. Phaedrus.

21:53 Mark Linsenmayer: Phaedrus, who started it, is first. So I chose Phaedrus just to give the one minute version. I'm not going to again act it out. I'm not going to put on the Phaedrus hat right now. I didn't bring the Phaedrus hat, actually. So his position, each of these guys kind of represents one of the strains in the culture. So we've got a tragedian comedian, an asshole, a pederast, a Super pederast and a doctor. Pederast.

22:18 Philosophy: A doctor.

22:20 Mark Linsenmayer: So Phaedrus is the one who suggested it. He goes first. He gives the kind of the most shallow speech and says stuff like.

22:26 Wes: Which is why you're starting it.

22:27 Mark Linsenmayer: Well, I picked it because it was short. That's why I chose this one. Phaedrus is a young guy. And really most of these people, when they're giving a speech, they're kind of defending themselves. They're saying something about their own experience. They're trying to. And the way pederasty worked in this particular part. You know, it's not all of Greece was running around doing this. It's just. It's this particular click of.

22:47 Seth: You're jumping my train here.

22:50 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm not going to give the whole thing.

22:51 Philosophy: That's how pederasty works.

22:52 Wes: Basically. It's people interested in philosophy.

22:55 Mark Linsenmayer: Right.

22:55 Philosophy: Is that what.

22:56 Wes: No, no, it's the.

22:58 Mark Linsenmayer: And that still holds true.

22:59 Wes: It's the high society of the time. It's like the. It's the Hollywood contingent or the entertainers.

23:05 Mark Linsenmayer: Yes.

23:06 Wes: Politicians.

23:07 Mark Linsenmayer: So the paradigm for all these guys when they're thinking about love is not necessarily. It's definitely not even between man and woman. It's between the people in the room. So Phaedrus is the young boyfriend of Eryximachus and Pausanias is the.

23:24 Wes: You have to look at the.

23:25 Mark Linsenmayer: I can't remember how these fucking things are pronounced. Pausanias is the older paramour of Agathon, even though Agathon is actually kind of getting up in years. So that's a little strange. But.

23:36 Wes: But he's also the best looking of the bunch.

23:38 Mark Linsenmayer: I don't know if Phaedrus considers himself

23:39 Seth: the best looking of the bunch.

23:40 Wes: He's wrong though. Agathon's legendary first good looks.

23:43 Mark Linsenmayer: So Phaedrus has often been the subject and it's really the. The lust involved. The Eros is the older guy and the younger one is supposed to just expect to actually resist for a while and then say, oh, okay, and kind of do it.

23:58 Wes: Pausanias speech right now.

24:00 Mark Linsenmayer: No, no, I'm just giving the background.

24:01 Wes: Just give the.

Phaedrus, just give Phaedrus.

24:03 Philosophy: All right.

24:03 Mark Linsenmayer: So Phaedrus is trying to defend his position as being manly. Even though he is a young frat kind of guy who is often hooked up with older men and responded to them with the appropriate gratitude, filial love. He's not supposed to actually get erotic about them. So his speech is all just about what it is to be loved and how awesome it is to be loved. And so he says, for instance, if you are beloved, then you will be more virtuous because you don't want to do anything unvirtuous around the person that loves you, right? So you got that pressure, you got that overlooking.

And the specific case, since he again is a manly soldier type that wants to show how awesome he is, he says that if a whole army is made up of couples like this or beloveds, they will just fight like crazy because they'll be too ashamed, you know, they'll not only want to protect each other, but because this is a defense of gays in the military, of an all gay unit in the military. It goes way beyond anything in modern discourse to say you would have a super soldier army. In fact, if they were all the beloved, if they were all like me, Phaedrus.

25:11 Wes: And in fact, historically, before the date of the. That the symposium should have taken place after that date, but before Plato wrote it, there was actually an army, a battalion effectively of the Greek army that was proposed by one of the leaders to be all lovers. And so is the lover's army.

It was wiped out eventually.

25:36 Mark Linsenmayer: So his speech starts off with just saying things like, Eros is the oldest of the gods. In the beginning was Chaos. But then love she designed, she devised first before all the gods. And it's after Chaos came Earth and love. And so that's not really much of a creation story. We don't even know where love came from. Chaos didn't create love. But he's at least throwing some words out to make it sound like he's saying something cosmic. But then he, you know, after saying love is the oldest of the gods, you know, lovers alone among mankind actually long to give up their own lives for the sake of their loved ones.

And this is true not not only of men, but of women too. Proof here can be found in the well known story of Admetus wife. So he gives these three little stories. As Alcestis, the wife of Admetus, was willing to die for her husband. Whereas Orpheus, you probably know the story, was not willing to die for his wife. His wife died and he said, instead, I'm gonna sneak down to Hades and get her back. And that seems like a pretty awesome thing to try to do to me. But Phaedrus thinks that that's the coward's way. Don't do the coward's way and sneak into Hades.

You should actually just die. And then you go to Hades and just be with her.

26:38 Mark Making Music: Come On.

26:40 Mark Linsenmayer: And then the most important story here is Achilles, which even though it doesn't in Homer's version of the Achilles story. So Achilles, Patroclus, one of his co fighters, is killed and there's a prophecy that says, hey, Achilles, if you go avenge Patroclus, you're gonna die too. But Achilles, he was beloved by Patroclus, so he was awesome. And he went out and he took revenge, killed Hector, even though he was gonna get killed. And so that shows being beloved makes you super brave, but apparently with some other source that actually made it so that Patroclus was the. The older lover of Achilles. And Phaedrus even wants to. Is disputing some of the textual.

27:22 Philosophy: Well, one of these places says Achilles

27:24 Mark Linsenmayer: was older, but that clearly.

27:25 Mark Making Music: No, no, no.

27:25 Mark Linsenmayer: Achilles was the young awesome one and he was the beloved. And so, you know, as I said before, it's usually the lover, the older one who's the one who gets all crazy because of arrows. So for a beloved to actually go and give your life for your lover, that by tradition you're really only supposed to be kind of grateful for and kind of yield to their demands and take their college recommendation essays and your job references and the other things like that. But Achilles was that awesome. And so am I, Phaedrus. Anything else?

28:00 Wes: Yeah, I think it. You know, I think what's interesting, the way this begins, if you're going to praise love, I think it's interesting that we start off with something that might be counterintuitive to the contemporary year, which is to say love makes us virtuous. This is the avenue that we're going to go down. We might be more used to something more akin to Aristophanes speech, where we get some idea of a romantic conception of love. It's something we want and we need and which will make us happy.

And in the case of Phaedrus, being love makes you virtuous. It's a little bit like the Panopticon.

28:35 Seth: Right.

28:36 Wes: And that the gaze of your lover will make you want to do good things.

Yeah. And I think there are two elements of that that we should keep in mind going forward. And one is one thing Phaedrus talks about is shame. So he emphasizes this word, shame. You don't want to do shameful things in front of your lover. So that's one of the reasons why you're gonna be more virtuous.

29:00 Mark Linsenmayer: Love is awesome because it makes you ashamed.

29:02 Wes: And the other is yay.

29:04 Seth: Exactly.

29:04 Wes: So this, and this is. And I think that's, you know, I think the dialogue is meant to convey. It's an odd approach. You know, someone starts out, let's praise love. Okay, let's talk about shame. And then the other. The other thing he talks about is pride. So it's. There's sort of a negative side and a positive side to it. The shame side is the kinds of things you want to avoid doing to avoid seeming disgraceful to your lover. And then the other, the more positive side of I want to do great things. And then, you know, towards the end of his speech, he gets towards self sacrifice, which is really just one species of pride and doing great things to impress people.

So this is all about recognition of the other. We could go back to our Hegel and our Lacan episodes connected to that. No, we're going to give little intimations so people can go to those episodes, think about those connections. But this is about, you know, as you said, the gaze. Right. Gaze of the other.

29:58 Seth: So let me preface my participation in this particular role by saying that I hate email. And Mark loves to write long emails.

30:10 Wes: Yes.

30:11 Seth: And so I don't read email very carefully. And when we were passing out who was going to do what role, he said, well, I've got number two and number three left. And I was like, all right, I'll take number two. Because it'd been about 15 years since I'd read the symposium.

30:25 Wes: And did you know you were playing Seth tonight? Is it.

30:30 Seth: No, but I was going to say it's a good thing I'm not a method actor or I wouldn't have made the trip because I'd be in jail. So Pausanias is basically a defender of. I won't call it. I don't believe. I don't believe it's the accepted view of man boy relationships in Athens. But it's certainly the view that's accepted by this particular group at this. At this gathering. And he's trying to extol the virtues of what it is for an older male lover to have a younger male lover. And the way he does this is that he first associates love with the goddess Aphrodite, which makes sense because Aphrodite is the goddess of love.

And Aphrodite has two aspects. So those of you familiar with the way Greek gods work, they manifest themselves in the world, oftentimes under different kinds of aspects. And Aphrodite has two. One is Urania. It's the daughter of Uranus, who is the heavenly aspect of Aphrodite. And then there's Aphrodite, Pandemos, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dion. Dion was a Titan. And that's the common or, you know, you can think of high brow and low brow version of Aphrodite. And he says love has these same two aspects. There's a heavenly aspect of love and there is a common aspect of love.

He sets that up first to then say which I think they're something that's interesting, but it's kind of a side note in his speech, which is that no particular action in itself is good or bad. So we don't say that one kind of love is good and one kind of love is bad. But everything is contextual. So it depends on who the two people are, or six people, depending on what you're talking about. It's honorable or shameful, depending on not just the people involved in the situation, but their intentions, which is, I think, a radically and radically interesting thing to throw out there at this stage in the game.

Because the idea of paying attention to intentions and action doesn't come along oftentimes for quite some time. So he says love is that same way. And we can't judge love absolutely in one way or the other. We have to look at the specific relationship. So the common love, this Pandemos common love, is the love that's only interested in physical gratification, sex. And because he relates it to Zeus and Dion, he says this is the love that you see in relationships between men and women, but also men and men. And he really says men and boys and he means sub adolescent boys.

It's a distinction we don't need to delve into today.

33:02 Wes: Well, with a little hair on the face preference, yes.

33:05 Seth: But what's interesting, by the way, is Dion, apparently, according to my very, very cursory research, is actually just the feminine name of Zeus. So it's kind of ironic that he says that it's male and female when in reality it's kind of two aspects of Zeus in that, in that respect. But anyway, the heaven research, yeah, that's

33:21 Wes: the rules, isn't it?

33:23 Seth: The heavenly love, on the other hand, is about something that I'll just characterize as a deeper reciprocal relationship. The way he characterizes it's actually more economic. There's an exchange of knowledge and wisdom for physical gratification. So it's definitely more of an exchange. But he's trying to characterize something that he thinks is a more meaningful relationship between two people beyond simply physical gratification. And because that particular aspect is related only to the God Uranus. He thinks that it's particularly male, and that's why he characterizes it as only available between an older male lover and adolescent, where the beard is just coming in.

Male lover. So that's his paradigm. There's a challenge when you're looking at these kinds of texts to abstract and try to generalize these concepts from the context in which they're articulated. So to be as generous as I possibly can be, because those of you who listen to the podcast know that I'm the generous reader and the textual guy, you know, I think what he's trying to say is, look, there is physical gratification and there is a deeper connection that you can have. His paradigm happens to be this older lover, younger lover, virtue wisdom in exchange for sexual gratification.

But I think the reality is he's trying to say you can have a meaningful connection. Love can be a meaningful connection between two people, or it can be simply physical gratification. And those are two aspects of love. And that's what he's trying to point out. And I think leaving at that distinction would be simply enough to characterize it. But again, in order to try to give the best possible characterization to this, there are two little asides in the conversation which I think are interesting. And the first is he mentions. He's talking about other cultures, tyrannical cultures, and some of these others.

And he says, you know, in this place where they don't think, where they aren't used to, like, coming up with ideas, they don't think anything's wrong with any of this stuff. They just. They don't even judge it because they don't. They don't think about it. But he says that this love, but this heavenly love between two people is actually forbidden in tyrannical societies in a way because it's subversive. Tyrants do not want people to have meaningful relationships with the. With each other. That in a totalitarian society, the tyrant determines what the relationships between people are going to be.

And that love, in this way. And he also mentions philosophy and sport, ironically, are really subversive in that kind of a society because it allows people to actually have meaningful connections and set the terms of their own relationship in a way that's not acceptable to the government. So I think that's one interesting one sentence pull out you can get from this. And then the other is that the two aspects of love represent the possibility of transcendence and corruption. He says that if somebody's seduced by money or power, they can never rise above that once you're a slave to those tastes, once you're essentially common love, Pandemos, you'll never get away from that if you give yourself into that.

But if you are able to transcend and participate and commit to this heavenly love, you can actually transcend that and escape this kind of corrupted form of existence. So that's the quick summary of Pausanias, as generous as I could possibly be about it. But I found it interesting after I was able to kind of get over my initial horror shock.

36:46 Wes: Well, it's worth noting that at this point, Aristophanes, who's supposed to speak next, goes into a hiccup fit. He is absolutely appalled by Pausanias speech. Not because he's not appalled.

36:59 Seth: He realizes he can't follow it. He's got to think about.

37:02 Wes: Well, I think he just can't laugh, you know, without giving offense.

That might be true.

37:09 Philosophy: Or he's drunk and has hiccups.

37:10 Seth: Wait, was it this kind Bullshit?

37:16 Wes: Yes, yes.

And that's the translation of the Greek word.

37:20 Seth: Was that capital or lowercase? I don't know.

37:24 Wes: And part of it is because the God.

37:26 Philosophy: Bullshit.

37:27 Wes: I think Seth. Seth gives the most generous version possible of what Pausanias could have been referring to. But it is clear that he is also just pandering to Agathon because he just is trying to get Agathon to believe that a relationship with him is going to be the way of greater virtue.

And also, you'll see, they're very similar speeches. Yes, they're very whitewashing speeches of love. So what's interesting is Phaedrus started out in a certain tack, which was very, very positive. And now you get this little. This introduction of the kink, which is that they're, you know, not all love is great. So we're setting the stage for the drama here.

38:09 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, so we should.

38:10 Mark Making Music: In defense of Pausanias.

38:12 Mark Linsenmayer: So I believe he was the custom for these pederastic relationships that the young boy would be 14 to 18 or something. And then once he got beyond that age, then it would stop.

38:22 Wes: And, you know, you're defending pederastic.

No, I'm really doing.

38:25 Mark Making Music: I'm saying.

38:26 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm saying Pausanias, let me put

38:29 Seth: on my anthropologist hat here.

38:31 Mark Linsenmayer: Pausanias is still in a relationship with Agathon even though agathon is now 31, according to something I read. So he's actually defending. He's saying that.

38:37 Seth: No, no, he says that. He says at the end of his speech, usually you stop. But sometimes if the relationship is super special. It can go on. Listen, I mean, this guy is clearly a straight man in this conversation.

38:53 Wes: So one thing we laughed at, the straight man.

38:55 Mark Linsenmayer: That's great.

38:56 Seth: I know, sorry.

38:58 Wes: You know, he goes into the required evasiveness of the beloved. So, you know, it sounds more like a game in some sense where so the beloved should resist the advances of the lover. And there are only certain circumstances under which he should give in. And those are sort of educational circumstances he can gain in virtue. So this is still about how love can make us more virtuous, but in this case it's the possibility of an education by an elder which makes it worth suffering their sexual harassment.

39:30 Seth: Yeah, no, no, you're right. And I mean, I didn't go into all those details because it seems to me that that's not material to the philosophical points that are being made as much as kind of the culture, him trying to justify the cultural conditions. But the idea is that there's this role to play and it's important that the beloved, the younger lover, you know, first of all, the families are supposed to be against this in a certain sense. It's against the societal norms. And so part of it is that the younger lover has to overcome the resistance of those social norms to then even be willing to try to entertain this.

And then that dance becomes a resistance where they refuse to give in. They refuse to give in and then eventually they give in, but only after they've extracted the wisdom or the appropriate. They have to verify that the lover, the older male, actually there for good intentions. And this goes back to what I was saying about him putting the context around. You have to pay attention to whether it's good intentioned and situationally correct. So in other words, the younger, the beloved has to vet the lover and make sure that he's doing this for all the right reasons.

He really wants to impart virtue and isn't a vulgar just, you know, simply trying to get sex kind of thing.

40:38 Wes: But there's a lot of skepticism even culturally about this kind of thing, which is one of the reasons one might interpret Aristophanes hiccups in anyway.

But I think the interesting thing is we're still talking about. It seems like Pausanias has deviated from the love is great because it makes us virtuous, but he really does come back to that at the end. But it's a different idea of how love instills virtue. In the first speech it's about being ashamed or prideful. In this speech it's about being educated. And we'll get a different version of how love instills virtue in each of

41:15 Mark Linsenmayer: these speeches we should throw out there. Obviously this whole thing is hugely sexist and Pausanias most of all. That the way that you've described it. If the only legitimate kind of relationships that's going to have the higher kind of love is when there's this teaching relationship where there's this pretty much the younger one is exhibiting his reason, exhibiting his restraint. And they just don't think that women can do that. And according to the intro to my book, it's because this state of purdah P U R D A H operated for Greek women, shutting them in the house and denying them education.

So that was the norm. So, you know, this whole pederasty thing, like it was not uncommon for the older man to also be married. You hook up with the wife to. Because you have to propagate the species because you need to. So it's only, you know, Pausanias is an extreme case that he's actually not bisexual, but straight up only the men because he just seems to want nothing to do with women because they only have access to this. If you're going to have any relationship with them, it would only be this lower kind of love. You could never have the higher kind, which is obviously anachronistic.

42:20 Wes: And this is a dialogue about the joys of bromance. I think it.

42:26 Seth: That being said, the generous modern reader could interpret this kind of power relationship between an older person and a younger person and you could transplant the genders if you wanted to. In order to make the same point. I will leave it at that.

42:39 Philosophy: The generous modern reader should also be careful. Like I'm all about separating out philosophies like purity as a discipline, but sometimes culture can leak into philosophy. And it's worth saying that about that dialogue of like, oh, that was a fucked up culture sometimes that did really fucked up things. And that probably leaked in a little bit like, yeah, you did a great job of extrapolating like, oh, there were positive things to say about the. There are two kinds of love. There's the man, man love, then there's the man everything else love. But yeah, also what the.

43:08 Mark Linsenmayer: But not what the record.

43:11 Seth: At least according to nothing about sodomy with animals.

43:14 Wes: So there's that, at least according to my.

43:16 Philosophy: It would take to Peter Singer all the way for us to get there.

43:19 Wes: But he's not representative of the culture, just according to my footnote. So there's a very complicated relationship between ancient Greek society and Homosexuality.

43:29 Seth: Agreed.

43:30 Wes: We're never going to get to Socrates.

43:32 Seth: No, sorry.

43:33 Philosophy: I think we can so on to

43:34 Wes: wait until people just start walking.

43:38 Philosophy: Eryximachus, who is a doctor, and he begins his by saying, aristophanes, hold your breath. And then if that doesn't work, drink water. And then if that doesn't work, tickle your nose, he'll sneeze and then your hiccups will go away. And I think that's the lasting contribution he gives to philosophy. Here are three things. You could do the sneezing work, by the way, as a doctor, right? And then he takes. So we've got this. Pausanias makes this distinction between, like, two different kinds of love. And Eryximachus wants to take that a step further and say that's not just something like, contingent about man or something that like men, these two relationships that we could have, but that those two different kinds of relationships are, like, grounded in nature and that we see love throughout nature, everywhere that we look.

There are animals that love their offspring and there is like, music is a kind of a love. And that like seeking greatness or seeking the higher good involves uniting those sort of discordant elements. So he offers the example of a lute player who. His job as a musician is to bring together notes that are normally discordant so that they are harmonious. And that his job as a doctor is to create harmony in the body where there would be discord. And back then, the job of a doctor was. He says something insanely specific, like, my job is to make it so that people can eat as much as they want without getting sick.

45:10 Wes: Like, that was.

45:11 Philosophy: What's the act? The actual line.

45:14 Mark Linsenmayer: I know, that's on my doctor's business card, right?

45:18 Philosophy: He also mentions, like, the seasons specifically of, like, the. The course of the seasons exhibits both of these, like, too far to one side or the other. So the summer burns everything, and then fall is nice, and then it gets cold and terrible and everything's snowy, and then spring is nice again and then summer. So he's bringing to. He's saying that there are these two kinds of love out in the world, one good and one bad. And our job as people is to constantly be seeking the good while expelling the bad. And here's one way that happens in love and in seeking out relationships and in caring for each other for reasons of, like, virtue and things that matter, and not being, like, just lustful or only into someone because they're pretty or something like that.

46:03 Mark Linsenmayer: Don't fall in with polyhymnia that sluttish siren.

46:06 Philosophy: Right.

46:06 Mark Linsenmayer: The goddess of the lower kind of

46:07 Philosophy: love that you have to be careful not to fall in with her.

46:13 Wes: But what's interesting is this. Sorry, that's pretty much it, right.

46:16 Philosophy: He's saying that there are these two kinds of love everywhere. So he's grounding it one level deeper, which is what you do when you're with a bunch of philosophers and you're dick measuring is you go, I'd like to take this one level deeper.

46:26 Seth: If that makes.

46:27 Philosophy: And talk about even what your point is grounded.

46:31 Wes: So what's interesting is Pausanias came in and he sort of got negative. He said, well actually there's, you know, it's not the Phaedrus whitewashing, there's higher and lower love. And now you get Euryximachus coming in and talking about this. Well, actually we need both. We need them in a certain kind of fusion or harmony. A certain, the right amount of each of them mixed together. What really rules the universe. It's a universal principle. So everything from health to music and all sorts of other things. It's an interesting way to try and bring to amend Pausanias sort of negative position on that.

Yeah, but all three of them have so far all basically talked about the effects of love rather than what love is. So they're talking about how great love is and what love can do for us, make us virtuous or bridge the gap between the good and the bad.

Well, I think this is getting a

47:27 Mark Linsenmayer: little bit more ontological, a little more cosmic. It just sounds like every pre Socratic philosopher that you've ever heard of that poses one, everything is water. That thing that when you hit that guy and he fell down, that was water. And then the sunrise, that's water. And so he's just saying, oh, it's

47:46 Mark Making Music: love, look, there's love.

47:47 Mark Linsenmayer: And not really getting any more specific or illuminating than that.

47:49 Wes: Yeah, well, the other, you know, the other, you know, another thing is we're still talking about praising love according to how it improves us or how it makes us more virtuous. He's a doctor, he's taking that attack of it makes us healthier and, you know, it makes farming better and so on and so forth. It's sort of a principle that, you know, even sort of poetry, music, and we expect all the other arts. Making stuff with love is how you do excellent work. But the other element here is he introduces his theme. He's the first one to talk about religion. So we're also, when we're thinking about love. We're also thinking about the relationship to the divine. He talks about impiety as basically a version of refusing to gratify what he calls orderly love, which is this harmonized, temperate mix of the high and low versions of love.

48:44 Seth: Yeah, I hated this speech. I mean, it's terribly written. It reads really poorly. I have to think relative to the others. But I got the idea of the balance and the idea that it's somehow harmonious. But I thought, isn't he the one he mentions. Does he mention Hesiod?

49:05 Wes: He talks about Heraclitus and the bow.

49:07 Seth: Okay.

49:09 Wes: Totally messes it up.

Which is an important foreshadowing of Socrates, by the way. This really is the first speech which is not static but dynamic. He's talking about mixture and tension and things the first two speeches don't talk about. And he's really setting the stage for Socrates in the way the other speeches don't.

49:27 Seth: Yeah. So I didn't do the secondary research to validate my 25 year old memories of reading Hesiod, but what I remember is that Hesiod tells the story of how there's sort of essentially the Earth God. Right. And the Sky God, but they're static entities. There's no interaction. They're just kind of. And it takes Eros to create that dynamic action between the two. And so I thought that's kind of the direction he was going to go originally, that he's really describing it. It's balance, but it's the balance of that tension, which is really a dynamic force that makes things happen. Without Eros, without some kind of dynamic tension, there's really just static beings that don't really interact with each other.

50:09 Wes: Well, this is why I thought you would actually like this speech. This idea of temperance and balance. You know, Phaedrus loved good and then Pausanias good or bad.

50:18 Seth: Right.

50:19 Wes: And then. No, we're gonna compromise. We're gonna mix them together.

50:22 Philosophy: Yeah.

50:23 Seth: I just didn't like the way it was written or spoken. Sorry, no offense.

50:27 Philosophy: Not me. He's been dead way longer than I have, which is none got away from it anyways. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine.

50:41 Seth: Okay.

50:43 Mark Linsenmayer: The first good one.

50:45 Wes: Yeah. I did like jump on this speech and I did feel a little guilty about it. When Mark Ste wants to take.

Yeah, he up picked. He picked the first one. We decided to divide up the speeches

and I just jumped in. I'll take the best.

50:56 Mark Linsenmayer: And this is such a famous part of the dialogue. That I'd never actually read this before this time, strangely. But I thought that was Plato's view, was this thing that you're about to talk about, because it's.

51:07 Wes: Well, he does, you know, as we'll see, he does serve as an integrator of all the different views. So we'll. But. Okay, so Aristophanes speech. So the sneezing worked, right? Was. Is it the sneezing that works?

51:18 Seth: Yeah.

51:18 Wes: Eryximachus actually means belch fighter.

Really?

Yes. Belch fighter.

It sounds. The name sounds cooler than what it means.

51:28 Mark Linsenmayer: Think of an application of that knowledge for your lives. In the next two,

51:34 Philosophy: it's Dr. Belchfighter.

51:35 Seth: But that's the.

51:36 Mark Linsenmayer: It's fine.

51:37 Philosophy: It couldn't possibly matter.

51:39 Wes: Once your hiccups are gone, you can talk about the sort of things Aristophanes talk about. About. So he tells a really arguably funny and bizarre sort of tale about the origins of love. And this is why I wanted to mention Euryximachus and the sort of introduction of the idea of the relationship to the gods, because Aristophanes is actually pivoting off that. And he will talk about early human beings and a rebellion against the gods and our attempt on the gods, which I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I imagine sort of running up the hill or tumbling with machine guns, trying to take over Olympus. But it's a myth.

52:18 Mark Linsenmayer: He's not trying to actually say this is the history. He's trying to give an elucidation.

52:22 Wes: I thought that went without saying, but, yeah, that's.

52:25 Seth: What are you talking about?

52:28 Wes: He's not trying to give a history of the human race. So human beings are, in the beginning, sort of like Siamese twins. They're joined together at what initially seems like the back, but it will turn out to be the front. And it can be male, male. It can be male, female. It can be female, female. And so the little. And they move around by sort of rolling right forearms and four legs. And so, yeah, so each human being has four arms and four legs. And they. Not at all freaky, but they're. He talks about their. So even though they seem ridiculous and absurd, he talks about their strength and their ambition, which makes me think of again of the first speech where ambition and pride are sort of motivators. So the gods. So they make an attempt on the gods, and the gods punish them by dividing them in two.

Zeus in particular.

Yeah, Zeus cuts them in two. So now we have regular bipedal. Well, initially, we don't have regular Bipedal human beings. We have human beings who. Their heads are still turned around in the opposite direction and so are their genitals. And they throw themselves on each other, but they have no way of really mating or joining. And so they're sort of dying in droves. So you get this image of these people who are sort of tragically attracted to each other, but there's no way to have a sexual liaison. And then Zeus, Remini, is that right?

No, no, that's exactly right. But I was just going that their source of wanting, they were one being and they've been cleaved for one another. And so they most, more than anything else, just want to be back together. So they were once whole and they tried to overthrow the gods. And the way to prevent that from happening, Zeus divides and conquers.

Yeah. So love on this account is an attempt to heal an original wound. This is the way Aristophanes talks about, is a wound that must be healed by joining back together. And so Zeus arranges things so people can actually copulate. And so the original different couplings of male and female are male, male. That explains homosexuality and lesbianism and heterosexuality, because we're all just trying to find our other original half. But I think one of the important things to take away from Aristophanes speech towards the end is so sex is not really about sex.

He says something like, so no one would turn down the chance to be made whole again. Sex isn't about sex. It's about this merger. It's about this being completed by the other half. And the other thing I think we should keep in mind is that he thinks of love as this sort of replacement. Whatever sort of aspirations we had to be godlike, our hubristic aspirations, our ambitious nature. Love is a sort of compensation. Love is what we get because we don't get to be gods. Instead we get to find our other halves and have happiness that way. So it's a kind of compensation.

So his true love is the reward for reverence of the gods. Where reverence means part of reverence means not attacking them.

55:29 Seth: Yeah. That description of having the genitals pointed the other way and not being able to fulfill your sexual desire is an excellent description of my adolescence.

55:47 Wes: I can't improve.

55:50 Philosophy: That kid's got his dick on backwards, I tell you.

55:53 Mark Linsenmayer: I believe as an important bit of foreshadowing, that the reproductive aspect of sex is something that is just granted by the gods. It's not part of what you actually want. You don't. You want to merge you don't want to.

56:06 Wes: It's really. I mean, it's strange in a way. In a way it's true to the psychology, which is lust and wanting to join another person, but it's strange that he leaves out children. So this is one obvious way that Socrates will be able to remedy this account by saying actually there's a reproductive element to people getting together.

56:25 Mark Linsenmayer: Well, I thought they both acknowledged it, but it was. Aristophanes said that it's sort of externally imposed. The gods, the people were dying out, so they moved the genitals around, made them mate and added this reproductive thing to mating. So the gods did that. It's not in our psychology, it's. It's just one of the byproducts. Whereas a major theme in Socrates's view is that, you know, whether it be actual reproduction or just creation, you know, making somebody else virtuous like you're virtuous artistic creation, that replication is going to be actually a conscious part of the erotic urge for soccer teams and the

57:02 Wes: way we be become like gods.

Right. Immortality. So we'll get to that.

The next speech. Aristophanes gives his speech and then it comes around to Agathon. And it's worth noting that in between each of these speeches there's little asides with respect to the rest of the audience and the participants. So we had the belching and the belch fighting and the nose tickling and

57:27 Mark Linsenmayer: they raised the scorecards.

57:28 Wes: Yep. So Socrates, after Aristophanes speech begins to complain about how good the speeches are. How can he possibly follow them up? And he's really nervous about Agathon's speech. And so Agathon goes and gives a speech and remember Agathon's the host of the party and he. Well, he likes himself.

He's a good looking guy.

He's a good looking guy and he's just won the competition. He's the talk of the town and akin to the other speeches, he gives a speech that reflects a lot on himself. And basically he gives a speech that does a couple things. One is it's done in a high rhetorical style and in reading it in English you get this, that it is a much more well crafted speech. But it also comes across even more if you can work through parts of the Greek that just the rhetorical style. And he alludes to it specifically. Socrates does actually that it's the rhetorical style of Gorgias and it's a name drop. But it's worth pointing out, did we, did we do gorgias yeah, yeah. So Gorgias is a famous rhetorician and sophist, a guy who taught people how to make great speeches in order to get out of traffic tickets. Yeah. Or getting killed, you know, or, you know, going in courts, basically, but also

how to become dominant political players and how to get ahead and influence people.

Yes. So basically, how do you talk and influence people and learn how to manipulate speech to get what you want? And the criticism that Socrates levels against that is great speech is only great insofar that it's directed towards the good. And the accusation he makes against Gorgias is that you make speeches in praise of anything, regardless of whether it's good. So Agathon embraces this style and gives this very first rate speech about love that's also in praise of himself. And he goes on and says that love is in fact the youngest of the gods.

Love is the most beautiful, most virtuous, and love's benefits are manifest in youth and beauty and virtue. That is in me. And so at the very end of the speech, and I'm just going to read this section because it's all about the poetry, because at the very end Socrates actually reacts to the way he ends it, saying, you know, it was a beautiful speech, but I can't even possibly continue because did you hear the

59:56 Seth: end of the speech?

59:56 Wes: It's just so he says. Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness away. Love calls gatherings like these together in feasts and dances and in ceremonies he gives the leaves. Love moves us to mildness, removes us from wildness. He is the giver of kindness, never of meanness Gracious, kindly, let wise men see and God's admirer. Treasure to lovers, envy to others, Fathers of elegance, luxury, delicacy, grace, yearning, desire. Love cares well for good men, cares not for bad ones. In pain, in fear, in desire or speech. Love is our best guide and guard. He is our comrade and our savior Ornament of all gods and men, Most beautiful leader and the best. Every man should follow love, sing beautifully his hymns and join with him in the song he sings that charms the mind of God or man.

1:00:52 Seth: Guitar solo

1:00:55 Philosophy: he's not unlike Kim Jong Su.

1:00:58 Wes: I read the same translation as you, but just hearing it read aloud.

1:01:01 Seth: Yeah.

1:01:01 Wes: That is amazing. It's true oratory.

What you want to imagine is he's like standing up and he's got a drink and he's talking. At the end he just goes like this.

Look at me.

It's beautiful. Now Socrates cowers away he doesn't want to do this.

1:01:23 Mark Linsenmayer: And even now, if you ask people in the popular culture, what is love like? It's that kind of crap.

1:01:29 Wes: It's beautiful.

1:01:30 Mark Linsenmayer: It's what you get on the radio.

1:01:33 Wes: Well, what's interesting. So in his case, so he's giving this possession model of love where love is something you possess, it sort of inhabits your character. He even talks about that at some point, about how ineffable it is and the way it's sort of, you know, it's kind of fluid and supple so that it can enter your soul.

1:01:52 Seth: Yeah,

1:01:55 Wes: its feet, it's soft like a liquid. So we're back to virtue, you know, I mean, I think we kept with it the whole way, but we're back to talking about how love instills virtue. Except the way we started this with Phaedrus is it's virtue in the lover who doesn't want to embarrass themselves in front of the beloved. But now it's sort of we are with the beloved, which is what Agathon is used to being. We're with the person who. And we're talking about love instilling. And he talks about specific virtues, courage and wisdom and so on and so forth in the way that love leads to these things by sort of possessing you or you possessing it.

1:02:38 Philosophy: So this one in particular, this sort of like really flowery language about love is something that we still see, but almost everyone's speech thus far contains elements that we still see in sort of the modern. Like, what is love like? Well, so you get the. With Pausanias you get this like, well, I mean, there's terrible love, which is just like being torn with someone and like, I love her, dad, you don't understand. Like, that is one. And then there's like the hard working, virtuous love. So even this, like, well, true love is hard work and communication or whatever.

And don't be 16. All of this shows up in culture. And while Socrates speech is like notable for being Socratic, it has the weird normal things that Socrates has going on. We're like, okay, the forms. Yep. And the love wisdom. Got it. Socrates. It's just interesting to me that like we continue to see all of this, all of these elements, all of these descriptions of love or how it, what it means to feel about someone still get talked about. And not, obviously no one is talking about them in the context of a symposium. These are just, these are almost like standard tropes about love that I'm not sure we'll ever get rid of you complete me.

Right.

1:03:50 Wes: Well, that's Aristophanes. But the other element that's. That would appeal to contemporaries is the. The way I summarize the speech in my notes is love makes us nice, which you got at in the books.

1:04:03 Mark Linsenmayer: That's the whole summary.

1:04:03 Wes: It's one of the. It's the way I like to remember because that's what, you know, his version of virtue is peaceableness and niceness. And he even contrasts that to this element, what he talks about as necessity. Things people do, you know, when they're trying to survive. Basically this love. Love is something you do when you have everything you need and it's a kind of surplus and it's peaceable and so, yeah, civilized.

So finally we get to Socrates.

So we didn't assign Socrates.

Well, we were going to do it together.

1:04:38 Mark Linsenmayer: Responsibility. Everybody in unison.

1:04:42 Wes: Well, so the first thing that Socrates does is he up at this point, this is halfway through, a little over halfway through. Socrates has questioned no one, which if you've read any other Platonic dialogue, you would recognize as being completely crazy. Socrates has not engaged in any kind of pedantic annoyingness. Yes.

1:05:01 Seth: No, thank God.

1:05:02 Philosophy: That's pretty annoying. I mean, he starts out like a very standard Socratic act, kind of like, oh, I didn't realize we were just here to say whatever we wanted. That's. I thought we were here to say true things. Now that I know that we're here to say things.

1:05:16 Wes: Yeah. He begins with a very harsh. Actually, we shouldn't rush over that.

No, we should begin. Yes.

It's like, you're an idiot. It's like, oh, so sarcastic. Forgive me.

1:05:27 Philosophy: I'm so sorry. You'll have to release me from my promise because I wasn't. I was only prepared to say truth, the true things. I wasn't prepared.

1:05:35 Wes: I did not know this was a bullshit.

You clearly the way you guys. I am not. I cannot bullshit.

1:05:42 Philosophy: So you'll have to accept my humble truth.

1:05:46 Wes: Sorry for caring about the truth.

1:05:48 Philosophy: That's awesome.

1:05:49 Wes: Sorry for wanting to say something.

1:05:50 Philosophy: That's my burden.

1:05:50 Seth: I suppose that's actually a good book. And to go back to the very first episode where I think we described Socrates as an asshole in episode one,

1:06:01 Wes: which explains our following.

1:06:04 Seth: We're now come full circle.

1:06:07 Wes: So once he gets over this thing about saying that he wants to talk about the truth, Socrates asks permission to ask Agathon questions because he wants to sort of sort some things out. So he first starts questioning Agathon about his speech and the main thing that he does is he takes on this claim that Agathon has of love is the youngest, the most beautiful, the most virtuous, that love is an extreme. Right. And that love is beautiful.

The first thing, this idealized version of love.

Yes, yes. And he basically says, well, is love of something or is love not of something? In Agathon says, well, love is love of something.

1:06:49 Seth: Why, of course, Socrates, it could not be otherwise.

1:06:53 Wes: Yes. So he's challenging.

1:06:56 Philosophy: There's a thing that is loved.

1:06:57 Wes: Yeah, there's something that is loved. And the other thing was in loving it, does that mean we want it, we need it, we desire it? He says, yes, yes, of course. And if we want it and need it and desire it, do we have it? No, no, we don't have it.

Yeah. So he wants to challenge this possession model of love that he talks about.

So love. Love wants the beautiful. Love cannot be beautiful. That's his whole shtick, which happens all the time.

If you want something, you are in need of it, you lack it, and you're, you know, we get into the sort of negative or the negation element of love, which is that if we desire something, if we have this sort of, you know, vector tendency towards something, there has to be something lacking in us to make us want it.

1:07:43 Mark Linsenmayer: If I want something that takes up physical space, there's no way I could already myself take up physical space, because otherwise I would not want the thing that takes up physical space.

1:07:51 Wes: We're gonna. We'll cut that out.

1:07:54 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm saying it's an obvious fallacy.

1:07:56 Wes: Well, no, it's an obvious fallacy on one level that love can't be. If the personification of love can't be beautiful. But it's not an obvious fallacy to say psychologically that if we want something, we have to be lacking in some way.

And he also makes the point that it's. It's not here. Right. It's in the speech with Diotima that makes clear the distinction that you can be strong and want to be strong and you can be beautiful and also want to be beautiful. He wants to avoid that mistake, that you can have the thing that you also want, but your disposition of wanting it has to do with you wanting it for all time.

1:08:33 Seth: Yeah, right, Exactly.

1:08:35 Philosophy: And that is right away.

1:08:36 Wes: Yes.

1:08:36 Philosophy: So you're reading it and you're thinking, like, I don't know, dude, I want to be smart and I'm pretty smart. And by the way, this is this first level of objection. What you really want is to Continue to be smart.

1:08:49 Wes: Yeah. If you're like Agathon and you have it all, there's the anxiety of keeping it all so wanting good things. Not just wanting good things, but wanting good things forever. Wanting to continue to have good things.

And so that's the point of this interlude where he questions Agathon and just to establish that love actually isn't beautiful or virtuous or good looking.

Right.

That love is.

It's lacking.

It's a lacking.

But then we get to the Diotima speech and we get this. It's not either all have everything or have nothing somewhere in between.

1:09:25 Seth: There's a little bridge here just to fill in a little gap. We talked about the first three speeches focusing on the outcomes or the aspects or the effects of love. And it's actually brought up that, well, you're not saying anything about the character or the nature of love, you're talking about effects. And so it's the latter speeches right before Socrates, where they're trying to actually characterize the types of things not. So love is young or love is the oldest of gods or the youngest of gods. And so what Socrates is doing is responding to that characterization to say, well, you said love was the youngest and most beautiful and this and that and the other thing.

But. But if love was the most beautiful, he wouldn't want beauty. So he's got a lack, to some extent, lack beauty. And he's doing this. What I think is exceptionally odd. This may be the weirdest rhetorical move in this entire thing where he says love's kind of in between beautiful and ugly and in between virtuous and not virtuous. You have to be in this kind of middle ground in order to be able to aspire in this sense of desiring that which you don't have. Because if you're all the way on the other end, then you somehow can't have that aspirational.

The ugly can't desire to be beautiful.

1:10:31 Mark Linsenmayer: You don't even know what beauty is.

1:10:33 Seth: You don't. You don't even know. The vulgar can't aspire to be virtuous because you're already somehow in that.

1:10:39 Wes: Yeah. Or the ignorant can't aspire to be wise. So being in between knowing and ignorance is one characteristic of eros, of that in betweenness. Because you are not wise, you don't know, but you are oriented towards knowing. You want knowledge, you want to become knowing. Whereas if you were ignorant, you would have a kind of complacency, you would be satisfied, you would not be directed towards knowing.

This is sort of evocative of the Meno.

Right.

It's not that we know all over again. Yeah, it's. It's not that, you know, all over again.

1:11:14 Seth: We can be.

1:11:15 Wes: It's not that we, you know, are completely. When we're seeking knowledge of something, it's not that we are completely lacking in that respect. Otherwise we have sort of clues, you know, we know how to inquire, we know we have some opinions about the thing we want to learn about and so on and so forth. So we have to have some sort of purchase on it. I mean, the whole idea is it's not these two very split extremes. So it's sort of a reprise of Eryximachus where we get these two elements. For him it was the high and low versions of love. Right. Which have to be harmonized and mixed together.

And here we have to have. It's evocative of that harmony in a sense. We get this in betweenness. We get something which partakes of both poverty and wealth, for instance. And life is sort of that in between state. We have periods of being sated by something, but hunger always comes back. And that's the dynamism I talked about earlier. These static views don't work. It's. They're sort of deathlike and nothing in reality really resembles them really. We have this in between state of sometimes being sated, other times feeling lacking and trying to sate ourselves.

1:12:25 Mark Linsenmayer: So just to put an explicitly Socratic language that the balance is, you know nothing. Well, that's bad, but you know, you know nothing. So that's good. So it's pretty much Socrates.

1:12:35 Wes: Well, you have to know you know nothing in order to be forward directed, in order to be a seeker. Yeah, yeah.

1:12:42 Seth: Now for those of you who weren't sitting in Dylan's living room last night after the third cup of wine, I got into some self confessional type of things you'll have to wait to see.

1:12:54 Philosophy: But part of that was Citizens Commons.

1:12:57 Seth: Yeah, Part of that was me saying how, you know, I don't. Ontology bores me and I'm very interested in ethics and political philosophy and all that, but.

1:13:04 Wes: Which you've never said before.

1:13:05 Seth: Yeah, never. Not tipping my hand here, but this particular point is, I think, I think it's radical in that it sounds to me because what comes out of this is it says, well look, the gods are good. The gods are purely good. They're in the virtue category. And then I guess you'd put Titans or somebody else's in the non virtuous category. And he creates this.

1:13:31 Philosophy: This is.

1:13:31 Seth: We're getting into Diotima's speech, but the idea that love occupies this third place in the hierarchy of gods. There's the gods, there's something else, and then there's these demons or demons, right. That it fits. And in that sense, I think he's kind of creating an ontology which allows for the third term. It's not just an epistemic indeterminacy. It's not just, I don't know this or I don't know that, it's that there are literally good, bad and not good or bad. And when you think about how the dual or this, you know, this notion that we've created these opposites and that the whole history of philosophy in a lot of ways is predicated on these ideas of opposites, good versus evil.

Right. And that sort of thing. It's amazing that this is here, I think, and I think it's here in a significant way. And yet at the same time, in many of the other Platonic dialogues it collapses. And a lot of what was built out in the history of philosophy is on this idea of a dualism or a strictly dual or two term nature. And there's something here, right here, that we could have grabbed a hold of

1:14:39 Wes: anyway, you got to mix them.

1:14:41 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, well.

1:14:42 Wes: And it's not just a mixture of static ness, right. Importantly, eros is actually a go between. The spiritedness is not just a third category of a kind of indeterminate static mixture, but actually is dynamic. It's a becoming, it's a process which is different than either of those two cases. And it's absolutely important. And for Socrates, his own spirit, it is his own daimon is something that moves and animates him. In the apology, this is what he appeals to that philosopher related to at the beginning, that his daemon is what pushes him and is what directs him towards wanting to know more things, wanting to know things and knowing that he does not know. Just like as related in the symposium,

1:15:28 Philosophy: I agree that I think he's doing something like metaphysical, not just like this isn't just an argument about knowledge. He's saying like, nope, third kind of thing. And that's why it stood out to me as almost like the place where I wanted the most argument. I wanted the biggest gap in how much argument I wanted to see versus how much there was. Because you're just like, you know, how you could not know, but want to know. And then there are people who don't know and don't know they don't. It was like a. Like a Rumsfeld. So you just blew through. Like you've got people who don't know, but don't want to know, and then you've got people who know, and then you have people who don't know and are like, I wish I knew. So anyway, you don't have to be. You can be in the middle with everything moving on. And it was like, everything. Nope. Is the forms. Got it.

1:16:08 Wes: Well, but what do you think about the. So Socrates relates that he learned everything about love from Diotima. In fact, early on, we skipped over this part. Socrates claims that the only thing he knows about is love, that he is

the doctor of love, which is a way of restating. The only thing I know is that I don't know.

Love is lack. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, I mean, in Greek, if you said I was a physicist or if I was a doctor, the way it's written in Greek is ta erotica. Right. I am the knower of love, like I would be the knower of physics. And Socrates initially claims that this is the only thing that I know. And just before he relays this, he says, I don't know why this crazy man to say that, because I can't possibly live up to that. But the person he learned it from was Diotima. At least that's what he says.

Who he's just made up on the spot.

He's just made up. Interestingly, she is a woman and a priestess. A priestess. And she teaches him about love. And he then relates a speech of hers. So he starts off talking about his relationship with Diotima.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

1:17:19 Seth: No, no, no, you didn't skip. There's another important point. She doesn't just teach him about love. She teaches him about love in the Socratic style.

1:17:27 Wes: Yes.

1:17:27 Seth: He learned his own. Annoying.

1:17:31 Philosophy: It's like the only thing he can do. This is.

1:17:33 Seth: This is in many ways a very subvert. If I lose a rigor or. This is the most subversive feminist text in the history of philosophy in a certain way, if you want to read it that way.

1:17:44 Wes: The interrogation comes from the feminine.

1:17:46 Seth: Absolutely. No, no, I'm just saying that everything that we ascribed to Socrates, he in turn ascribes to Diotima.

1:17:52 Wes: Yes, that's exactly right.

He's midwife. I mean, he. You know, this isn't the only place where he emphasizes his femininity, that the femininity is what's functioning in him when

1:18:01 Seth: he's yeah, yeah, absolutely.

1:18:03 Wes: After sort of giving sort of his introductory background and talking about Diotima, he then says, well, this is what Diotima told me. And basically gives a speech in her voice.

1:18:12 Dylan: Right.

1:18:13 Wes: And you have to.

1:18:13 Philosophy: I mean, her voice in his voice.

1:18:16 Wes: Her voice and his voice. And of course, this is Apollodorus saying Aristodemus.

1:18:22 Mark Making Music: Right.

1:18:22 Philosophy: Relays a dialogue.

1:18:23 Seth: And then I said this and the truth.

1:18:27 Wes: Yes, but what I was thinking about that speech was the origin myth at the beginning, where Eros is born. From that, it seemed to be a case where there's a little bit more content and not just walking by. I mean, it's told in the form of a myth.

Poverty and resource.

Poverty and resource, yes. So Eros is born out of poverty, which is Penia, and resource, which is Poros, is the child of them, and born on the day that Aphrodite was born.

So we get reproduction, it's going to end with reproduction, but we get that

from the very beginning as well.

This in betweenness is the result of reproductive act.

And so for Eros, entire existence, Eros is both poor but never rich, always has resource but never has enough, and is always in between and striving and striving.

So in between life and death, poverty and wealth, wisdom and ignorance, effect dies

and then is reborn.

Right.

1:19:25 Mark Linsenmayer: Now, is this supposed to apply just to people or is this a metaphysical point? Like I thought the Eryximachus Cosmic Love Makes the World go Round was just something that was thrown out there as a piece of bullshit and then dropped. But you're not saying that this is. He was setting the ground for this whole metaphysical point.

1:19:40 Wes: I think he does set the ground for that. See, Socrates is obviously impressed, improving on it, because I think, you know, as we've mentioned before, Eryximachus is just talking about mixture. And we want to get something more dynamic where this is a third category, the in between, in its own right and has its own ontological.

1:19:58 Mark Linsenmayer: Plato is usually characterized metaphysically as a Parmenidean, as that is the opposite of Heraclitus. It's not that everything is flux and teleology, motion. It's that there's. What's really real is the forms that are static. And that's why this was such an influence on Christian thinking, because, you know, what's really real is God. And then the rest of this is just so much effluvia.

1:20:19 Wes: And it sounds like he's an empirical Heraclitean and a transcendental Platonist. He accepts. He accepts. Yeah, it's a Kant joke. He accepts Heraclitus.

1:20:31 Seth: Quick check. How many are Team Parmenides and how many are Team Parmenides? Team Heraclitus. Team Heraclitus. Right. All right, good.

1:20:38 Wes: It's so easy to be a little bit.

1:20:39 Mark Linsenmayer: I don't know what the fuck you people are talking about.

1:20:41 Seth: Come on.

1:20:46 Wes: No, but in a way, he accepts the Heraclitean skeptical kind of critique, and that's why he's trying to set up something that there's a little sort of set aside area that's immune to that. And that's where we can actually have knowledge of things. The world is flux and unknowable, simply empirically. And so we need this separate world of ideas that are knowable.

1:21:13 Seth: The world is flux. Right, but the question is, why is the flux there? What's the motivation to do any one thing or another? And there's a sense in which you can read this as being a synthesis where he's bringing in some kind of Parmenidean structure in order to try to create a motivation. Otherwise, because the flux has to have some kind of dynamism to it.

1:21:33 Wes: He's a total Heraclitean in his dialogue. I'm gonna make that argument. And you get the foreshadowing of this in Euryximachus speech. So that even though Euryximachus is talking about harmony and mixing, I mean, harmony is on the right track. And he talks about the Heraclitean bow. The idea of this sort of tension, I don't know, dynamic in between tension

and the stasis is born out of that tension. And Heraclitus.

Yeah, and Heraclitus, everything is sort of, you know, this goes back to our Eva Brann, Heraclitus, she comes first and then billing. Yeah. The tension is sort of a fundamental grounding of things. And I think that's what we get here. It's not these static categories that are grounding for the world. It's this dynamic tension.

1:22:19 Seth: Right.

1:22:20 Wes: So just to explain, that's what it means to say love is the. Just to give the nicest of all

1:22:23 Mark Linsenmayer: things the 32nd version. For people that did not listen to our Heraclitus episode and have no idea what we're talking about. The idea is just ultimately, what is reality? Is it a static thing and everything, all the apparent change is just illusion somehow. Right. Or is the apparent changes. That's really all there is? There's nothing behind it. And so a pure. This is. Heraclitus actually had a more subtle view, which you can Go listen to that episode and learn more about. But he at least is characterized whenever he comes up in a Platonic dialogue as just this pure. Everything is flux. And Plato just thinks that doesn't make any sense, that ultimately unless there was something stable underneath the flux, then it would just collapse on itself.

1:23:04 Wes: But I think what's really important here is that that characteristic of Plato is being only focused on forms. You realize that that is not the whole story when you read this. It's really important that over and over and over again Socrates says, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. And that it's an orientation towards knowing more, a desire in this dialogue, an erotic desire to know more. And that the characterization of the sum of Plato and Socrates is an orientation towards static forms is. It's missing something that is plainly there when you read the dialogues.

Yeah, and the kind of static notion aligns with this, the possession theory of love, which he's rejecting, which he starts out sort of. It's really more Agathonian critical of Agathon. But it really also applies to Aristophanes because for Aristophanes it's about possession of the other half. And you know, there's that little remark in the beginning of the dialogue, if only knowledge or teaching were like pouring, you know, water into another vessel. That's another sort of static conception of what it means to learn along these lines. So what we get into with his rejection of it sort of is rejection of Aristophanes conception of loving that leads us to. It's actually not the other half we love, but it's the good. And that's a kind of pivot into Diotima's speech where we now, you know, we get to the next part of the account.

1:24:36 Philosophy: Are we rejecting the idea that love is the mediator between like the static and the flux?

1:24:42 Wes: I think we're accepting that.

1:24:44 Philosophy: Okay, right.

1:24:44 Wes: Yeah, yeah, great.

1:24:47 Mark Linsenmayer: Whatever the hell that means.

1:24:50 Wes: It means being a lover. That love is not directed is not the beautiful, it's the activity of being, being a lover. That's what the invitation between us is.

Yeah, yeah. It's not possession of beauty, it's a vector. It's a directedness towards the beauty that we lack. But it's still a directedness.

1:25:08 Mark Linsenmayer: I understand that, but I still don't think that it. That that counts as a reasonable sounding metaphysical position to say, you know, like I was just describing that there's one

1:25:17 Wes: that's like process philosophy and my loving

1:25:20 Mark Linsenmayer: means I am directed towards.

1:25:22 Wes: Isn't this just something like process Philosophy and saying it's, you know.

Yeah, it's activity. It's becoming.

1:25:28 Seth: Any whitehead.

1:25:29 Philosophy: Any whitehead. Super. That was.

1:25:33 Seth: I think he. I mean, I think he gives a very. By the way, this is kind of the denouement. So if you're still awake.

1:25:39 Wes: No, I think we still haven't quite gotten the end of Socrates.

1:25:43 Mark Linsenmayer: We haven't actually gotten to the Socrates.

1:25:45 Wes: Reproduction. We need to get to reproduction before we.

Yes, we have to do that.

1:25:48 Seth: Okay, well, but there's. There's the fact that this is somehow kind of a inductive process. Can we go there now? Or is that.

1:25:56 Philosophy: Yeah, sure.

1:25:57 Seth: Okay. So he tries to tie back in to some of the speeches we heard earlier where he says, okay, let's start with. You're the lover and you love a beautiful person.

1:26:06 Philosophy: Right.

1:26:07 Seth: It's that. That love. That physical beauty. And he says, you'll love a beautiful person and you'll realize there's lots of beautiful people. And you'll realize that there's nothing really particularly special about that particular beautiful person, that what you love is physical beauty. And so then you start loving all beautiful people. Right.

1:26:24 Wes: That's when you know you've made progress.

1:26:27 Seth: When you're wilt.

1:26:28 Wes: When you're prescribed, when you're promiscuous, you go knock a lot.

1:26:32 Mark Linsenmayer: It's not literally loving all beautiful people.

1:26:34 Mark Making Music: No, no.

1:26:34 Seth: But when you realize that what you love is physical beauty and not that particular beautiful person.

1:26:39 Philosophy: I'm not into her because of the way she looks. I'm into her because of the way anyone could look.

1:26:46 Wes: No, that's.

1:26:46 Philosophy: You're right. I didn't mean to.

1:26:49 Wes: Right.

1:26:49 Philosophy: I didn't mean to imply that you were that shallow. Sorry. Yeah.

1:26:53 Seth: And then you kind of. If you're the right kind of soul, whatever the. Whatever the right criteria is, you can say, okay, well, I realize I love beauty, but it's transient. Beauty comes and goes in individuals, and it's. And you. You transcend the love of physical beauty to the love of a beautiful soul. And I don't know if you go through that whole individual and collective phase again, but you go from loving individual physical beauty to some sort of like. Like more transcendent beauty. And then you're able to then go beyond that and talk about love of beautiful things. I mean, beyond just souls, but also, you know, other sorts of things and

1:27:28 Wes: the laws and customs, basically things that you know about. So. Yeah.

1:27:34 Seth: And ultimately, the point is you're climbing the ladder of beauty, the ladder of love, abstraction of beauty, which is also going from the particular to the abstract. And you will end up where. Crowd response. You'll end up at beauty itself. Right. The form of. The form of beauty, which is not used. They don't use the word form. Right.

1:27:55 Wes: And the good.

1:27:56 Seth: And the good. And that this is in some way, in many ways, one of the most coherent kind of presentations of the idea of the Platonic form in all the dialogues. And it ties it to this notion of induction, where somehow you can continue to work your way through an abstract layer until you get to some sense of abstraction where you're not actually moving to a next level, but you're. Read the dialogue. Because I can't recreate what he says about that particular last stage. But there's some kind of a movement at the very end where if you're the special kind of person, which is to say you are a lover, a lover who is also a philosopher.

1:28:39 Mark Linsenmayer: Right?

1:28:39 Seth: Yes. Then you will be able to apprehend, encounter, know the form of beauty, the form of the good. So not tied to any particular.

1:28:49 Wes: One interesting thing is here, is there? It's sort of a rebuttal of the Pausanias notion of high and low love. Right. So instead of them just being these radically disparate things, there's actually one as a ladder to the other. And it actually doesn't stop at souls or character, the way Pausanias thinks of it. The higher form of love is you love someone for who they are. Right. And that's sort of amenable to contemporary ears. You know, you don't just love someone for the way they look, you love them for who they are. But for Socrates, no, it goes beyond that.

You learn that that is also not a secured foundation for love. You love beauty itself. But I think until we complete the account, that kind of sounds vague. It's not just we love beauty itself at its sort of instantiation in some particular. Another. It's what beauty does, which is the reproductive element. And that's how we can understand what he calls the purpose of beauty. So the purpose of beauty is to reproduce, which actually means a few different things.

Yeah. So at this point we have sort of his account of what love is. That's love is wanting to possess the. The beautiful or wanting to possess the good forever. So it's direct. It's a directed activity directed towards the beautiful and the good. That's what love is. And then we get the purpose of love.

1:30:07 Philosophy: This is like. I also want to say, like, while this is a response to a lot of those other ideas we've Convicted. A lot of those other ideas of being self serving. And this is like pretty self serving. I think what we got, like Socrates is like, well, love is wanting beauty. And then you, it goes, goes higher and higher and everyone's like, is he going? Yeah, he's going to the forms. And then you love beauty everywhere and then you love. And it's like, here it comes. Then you love beauty itself. And that leads you to love wisdom. And I don't know what kind of person would love wisdom. I mean, what would you even call that?

1:30:38 Wes: I don't know.

1:30:39 Philosophy: But maybe I'm one of those, I don't know.

1:30:43 Wes: But there's an element of plausible kind of self help as well, because it's the reproductive element is actually important relationships. It's not just oh, here's a great soul, and now I love them forever. I mean, it reminds me of some study I saw recently where they came out with something that said people who sublimate together stay together longer and there's some element.

People who sublimate together.

Yeah.

Someone.

People who have common interests

1:31:12 Mark Linsenmayer: stay together.

1:31:13 Wes: Just leave it and stay together. Yeah.

1:31:15 Seth: What does that mean?

1:31:16 Wes: People who have common interests, they have something else that they both love. They can't just love each other. There has to be a third thing that they both love to do together. And that's part of the point here. Whether it's children, the procreation of children, or whether it's a friends seeking knowledge together or any other type of what you want to call reproductivity. There has to be a dynamic element to the relationship, activity, you know, some common activity.

I thought they were just transforming from solid to gas immediately.

Wait, did I.

That they were sublimating.

Oh, I see, I see.

1:31:54 Mark Linsenmayer: The physicist meets the psychologist.

1:31:56 Philosophy: Is that a science joke? Yeah, very funny science joke.

1:31:59 Wes: Let's not get each other's jokes all night.

1:32:03 Philosophy: This is probably the mortal quails.

1:32:06 Mark Linsenmayer: It's probably the single most influential insight in the symposium that when you love somebody as much as anthropologists or psychologists might tell you that you are, it's just animals. And you'll be attracted to anybody of a certain physical type that is near you. The actual experiences of love is transcendent, that you don't, even if you have them right there, you just want more, you want to eat them, you want something and you can't even name it. And that's, you know, you see God through them. It's really become something.

1:32:37 Wes: So you want to be immortal again.

He's elaborating on the Aristophanean account. Right. Aristophanes said, it's not just sex we want. It's merger. No, it's not merger we want. Merger is actually scary and merger is death. You don't just want to merge with the other person. You want that individuality and you want the in betweenness that he talks about. You want that dynamic continuing to live. And that's where reproduction comes in. Reproduction in the presence of beauty is what it's all about.

1:33:05 Seth: I think what reproduction does in this context, if you think of it in terms of I want this and if I possess it, I will be happy. So you want to possess the other. You want to possess the other person. And this is really a very strong condemnation of that point of view to say possession is not enough. And even going beyond possession for all time, which was the notion we brought up earlier, that desire is either desire of a lack of something or it's a desire to have something that you have forever. What he's saying is, no, true love goes beyond possession to the extent that you want to perpetuate. You want to go beyond your own existence, beyond your own, and perpetuate this thing forever. And it could be through children, it could be if you. Through art, it could be through virtue.

1:33:52 Mark Linsenmayer: The beloved is your mute.

1:33:53 Wes: But also. But it ends with it's through virtue, which, again, it's, you know, again, love. I was going to say praise of love is about.

1:34:00 Philosophy: Right.

1:34:00 Wes: But it's about. So he talks.

1:34:02 Philosophy: The.

1:34:02 Wes: The highest thing is that for love is to give birth to virtue in a person.

That is.

That is really the ultimate.

And cities, though.

Okay.

Like, isn't it the greatest, beautiful, most beautiful part of wisdom deals with the creation of cities and households.

Well, but that's. That's at stage two of the latter.

Yeah. Yeah.

1:34:22 Seth: That's an extension, isn't it?

1:34:24 Wes: Yeah, Fair enough.

1:34:24 Seth: Create virtue in the individual versus in the community.

1:34:28 Mark Linsenmayer: So you're with your beloved and it excites you. Even just the thing that you might like to do together is even just be together, have a conversation that you are this person that is your love is the one that really gets your mind going, that really gets you. If you're artistic, then you'll use them as your muse. If you're not, then there are many other things that you might do in reaction to that.

1:34:50 Wes: Yeah. I mean, relationship problems revolve to some extent around these problems of possession and merger. Right. People who are too boundaryless or there's too much boundaries or too distant from each other or they can't love someone for a long time because they love the chase and possession is boring. And that's where being in the in between position of being a seeker and being co seekers, let's say, instead of co supplimators, is not an important part of love. Which I think, you know, is a great philosophical and psychological insight. In this dialogue.

1:35:26 Philosophy: It's really impressive how like sort of scientifically disposed the dialogue is. Especially Socrates part like he's clearly trying to explain as much as he possibly can about what he knows about love. It's not, I mean, yeah, obviously some of the poetic accounts were very strange, but he's like, he's very much taking into account like, yeah, and love makes us want to have kids, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense out of first pass. So let's talk about exactly why that's going on. Or love doesn't seem to consist in these like deviant ways of having relationships, like possessing. So what could explain all of this?

1:36:01 Wes: But love is also the thing that makes us want to attain anything, that wants us to create cities, wants us to that kind of immortality. And it's interestingly importantly, directly rooted in our physical experience, but it transcends outside of our physical experience.

Yeah, and I think, you know, again, this, even though we've sort of emphasized sublimation and doing art, say, let's say artistic things, again, I think that's sort of, that's still not the whole way up the ladder. It is really about this concept of virtue, which is why the last speech that Alcibiades gives makes sense, because that speech is about Socrates as a paragon of virtue. So before we, it completes this speech,

1:36:46 Mark Linsenmayer: before we jump to that, I wanted to. So one of the points that connects the giving birth and the ladder of beauty is this. Technically, however, it's impossible for the soul to conceive in the presence of anything ugly. Ugliness, after all, is totally out of tune with the numinous. And in this divine right there can be no threat of discord. Beauty, on the other hand, is very much in harmony with the divine. To be critical for a second, you know. Yes, I like the idea that you are my beloved and you excite me to create art and things. But aren't people also excited by the ugly? Isn't tragedy also something that gets you going?

1:37:18 Seth: I mean, I put this in the

1:37:20 Wes: category tragedies are beautiful.

1:37:21 Seth: I put this in the category of this sublime artifact in the same way as pederasty. If you want to go back to, you know, this idea that there's this. I don't want to go back to. No, no, no, that doesn't sound like Pausanias.

1:37:33 Wes: You really keep bringing it back to pederasty.

1:37:37 Seth: There's this identification of the good and the beautiful. You know, look, go listen to our episode on Genealogy of Morals if you want to get that. That story in a particular favor. But I don't think there's anything. I mean, that's. I think we just put that in the category of. Yeah, it's a quirk. But the idea that love is. Love is the inspirational force. Love is the creative force. If you create anything, if you move forward in your existence as a human being and you make something of yourself, you try to better yourself, become a more virtuous person, or you have children because you want to create a family, or you inspire others through teaching to become thinkers or creators of themselves.

That's what love is. That's what Socrates is saying here. That's the purpose. That's what love does. Which I think brings it back to that cosmological Hesiod point of. Love is the motive force. It's the dynamic counterbalance to the static world of things and beings. It's the thing that creates and generates activity, which in turn results in beauty, the creation of beauty, whatever form that might take.

1:38:48 Philosophy: But is he. He's not saying. I don't think that, like, love is some force that motivates those things. It seems like he's saying. He's more closely identifying love with the motivation itself. Right? Like love is the motivation to do better.

1:39:03 Mark Linsenmayer: Love is the activity.

1:39:04 Philosophy: Right. Or the disposition or something like that. He's not saying love is like the plus to the minus of static. It's not the opposite static disposition to.

1:39:16 Wes: It's in between the two.

1:39:17 Seth: It's the relation. It's the thing that. It's the thing, the relation between two static things.

1:39:23 Dylan: Right.

1:39:23 Philosophy: I'm just so. He's not saying. And some of the other guys in the dialogue tried to say, like, love is this. Well, it's a God. And he's even saying something like. But it's not even really a thing we can properly talk about as, like, it's the motivation itself. It seems like you're saying,

1:39:41 Mark Linsenmayer: take us

1:39:42 Seth: home with Alcibiades or we skip Alcibiades.

1:39:46 Wes: Well, we have to mention. So at this point.

Well, it's not just like a little irrelevant.

It's not an irrelevant thing because, again,

it goes towards the virtue point.

So at this point, Socrates finishes His speech and a carousing gang of drunkards break into the Symposium, this staid and quiet drinking party where they were just talking about boys. Talk.

1:40:12 Philosophy: Well, they were also.

1:40:13 Mark Linsenmayer: Which boys did you like?

1:40:14 Philosophy: They were also nursing hangovers.

1:40:16 Wes: Yes. So they were all. So Alcibiades bursts in with his entourage. And Alcibiades, most of these characters in Platonic dialogues, they often were famous people in Greek culture. And Alcibiades is one of the most famous, and he is famous in politics for having led, argued for the Athenian invasion of Sicily, which ended up being a complete disaster for the Athenians and brought the whole civilization basically to an end. And Alcibiades is one of the great leaders, great political leaders. This is also a theme in the Platonic Dialogues is a lot of the people that Socrates interacts with are the young men who are going to be or are leaders in Athenian society. Which is why he's brought to trial. Right. Because some of the people who are their fathers want, think that he's a troublemaker because he's pushing them to do things that are different than what they think they ought to be doing.

1:41:14 Mark Linsenmayer: So the corruption of the youth, in particular, this was. He argued that we should attack Sicily. And then for some reason, various reasons, he was going to be arrested. So he left town and so they attacked Sicily without him. And it was, well, in fact, a disaster. And so they blamed him.

1:41:28 Wes: Well, in fact, the reason that he was arrested was because he was accused of desecrating the Hermes, which are these statues that sit outside of everybody's houses. And one account is that this Symposium, this story takes place on the night in which Alcibiades was supposed to. To have desecrated the Hermes.

1:41:47 Philosophy: Wow.

1:41:48 Wes: And that this is an account for why he was not the one that did it.

1:41:53 Mark Linsenmayer: This is his alibi.

1:41:54 Wes: Yes, Alcibiades.

So anyway, that's getting a little bit. But so Alcibiades bursts in, he's completely drunk. He's got an entourage with him. He doesn't even notice that Socrates is there. And he greets Agathon and he gets himself. He's going to give Agathon a wreath and. And he sits down next to Agathon and then he turns and Agathon says, well, there's room for three of us on the couch. He's like, well, who else is here? He turns, he looks at Socrates and he leaps up and he says, you're always wherever I am. You are constantly cursing my, following me around. And he leaps into this kind of drunken speech about how Socrates is his worst tormentor as a lover, but also the greatest.

1:42:43 Mark Linsenmayer: They ask him to make a speech. They say, look, you just broke on. We were giving all these speeches. Now you tell us about love. And he says, well, I'm not going to tell you about love in general. I don't know what the hell that is about, but I can tell you about my experiences with Socrates and what kind of guy he is.

1:42:56 Wes: So he insists on giving a speech not in praise of love. Everybody else is giving a speech about love. He's going to give a speech in praise of Socrates, whom he loves, Whom he loves. So it's a drunken speech, though pretty well articulated for a drunken speech.

1:43:14 Mark Linsenmayer: So it's like drunk dialing, except in front of a lot of people.

1:43:18 Wes: Yes, yes, yes.

So we get some things about Socrates frustrating him because Socrates won't give him his physical desire. Yeah.

So Alcibiades wants him. Socrates, one effect, he. He tells a story that he says he's never told anybody else, which is he had this time alone with Socrates and he embraced him and they, in fact, slept together. But nothing happened, he says. He said, I swear to God, nothing happened. And it was horrible. That's what Alcibiades says.

1:43:49 Seth: Again, like, adolescence, it has a very,

1:43:53 Philosophy: like, teenage adolescent sort of feel to it, where he's like, well, I was like, we should hang out sometime. And I asked him, and then we did hang out. Nothing happened. So I was like, hey, let's wrestle. And then we wrestled and, like, he kept beating me, and I was like, finally. And then that didn't happen. So then I was like, you should come over and I'll make you dinner. And I, like, cook for him and everything and that, like. And then we just sat on the couch and he left. So then I was like, that didn't work. So I had him come over for dinner again.

And then we were just sitting on our couch talking, and I was like, socrates, boy, you're really great. And then Socrates says, like, well, you must see something in me that I don't see in you. Like, I appreciate. He says, like, I appreciate the compliment. You must see a goodness in me that I don't share. So what's up with that? He's like, oh, I totally do. Everything's great. And he, like, throws his coat around Socrates. So they're like just bodies now. And then they just pass out.

1:44:46 Wes: Well. And in fact, he says. Alcibiades explicitly says, I will give myself to you.

1:44:52 Philosophy: Right?

1:44:52 Wes: Yes.

1:44:53 Philosophy: I feel like you have so much to teach me, and I just Learned so much from you. Yes, I'll do whatever.

1:44:59 Wes: Just take me.

1:44:59 Philosophy: It would be bad of me not to do whatever you want, since you have so much to teach me. I mean, you should see what I do for people who don't have anything to teach.

1:45:07 Mark Making Music: If I want to do that for

1:45:08 Philosophy: them, I should do that for you too. And Socrates is like, that's probably fine. Don't even worry about it.

1:45:13 Wes: Well, no, in fact, Socrates says, you would have me trade gold for bronze, right? So which is. Which is an allusion to the Iliad. But he says, what I have to give you is gold to that bronze. So he actually explicitly insults him.

1:45:31 Philosophy: And then Alcibiades goes, okay, great. Like, thinks that's okay, great. So now let's sheer clothes, like, just misses that.

1:45:39 Mark Linsenmayer: So next time you're about to say it's not you, it's me, say that instead.

1:45:42 Philosophy: That would be, I have gold and you have bronze. That's on me. And then he finishes with like, so watch out for him is all I'm saying. Like, he's gonna use you and Socrates. Like, that's not what our relationship is. What are you doing?

1:45:57 Wes: Well, but some of this tragedy, though,

1:45:59 Mark Linsenmayer: the tragedy, according to Alcibiades, is that he gets that Socrates is a great teacher and he's a seeker. He realizes that the kind of life that Socrates is pushing is the kind that he actually aspires to.

1:46:14 Wes: Well, he complains about being bitten in the heart by right philosophy, but then

1:46:19 Mark Linsenmayer: as soon as Socrates leaves, then he just starts to try to plead the masses again.

1:46:23 Wes: Basically, yeah, he's a guy. He has a political, active, you know, go out and do things kind of guy. And Socrates says, that's all a waste of time. You should be doing philosophy. And he's tempted by that, but he can never fully get into that, so he explicitly complains about that. But then, obviously, all of this is a metaphor for what it's like to be a philosopher. What it's like to love something that doesn't reward you with. Yes, exactly.

The form of the being,

to do something which, you know, isn't obviously useful, doesn't produce technology, doesn't produce these sort of other gratifications.

1:47:07 Seth: It doesn't fulfill desire. Philosophy is the study of that which doesn't fulfill desire.

1:47:13 Wes: Being a lover, you are always in the position of a seeker. You never get these fully satisfying answers to your questions. You are warned, philosophy will never go to bed with you, no matter how hard you try.

1:47:25 Seth: Philosophy will never go to bed with you. All right.

1:47:28 Mark Making Music: You're unsatisfied by.

1:47:30 Mark Linsenmayer: That's just the way it works.

1:47:32 Dylan: Sorry.

1:47:35 Wes: So. But there's also, I think, besides, it's not clear to me that he's necessarily trying to get Alcibiades to be a philosopher in the way that Socrates is a philosopher. In fact, I don't know that Socrates really would be. Believes or partakes of sort of the professionalization notion of philosophy, but certainly he'd want him to be a philosopher in the sense of being directed towards virtue and being directed towards the good. And in particular, for a leader like Alcibiades to lead and rule the city with an eye towards the good and not towards what is just of holding. Just holding power. Right. So it's a part of it is trying to persuade the rulers to rule well by having the proper disposition of their proper direction of their own

rule. He's not a good poster boy for that.

No, Alcibiades is not.

So despite being. Yeah. Despite being enamored of philosophy and Socrates, it's not something.

Yeah. So it doesn't always work. This could also. You could also say.

1:48:45 Seth: This is.

1:48:46 Wes: This is Plato saying, well, he tried, Socrates tried. But.

But we should also say he doesn't. You know, he does also go into this thing about all of Socrates different virtues.

Yes, yes.

So it's not, you know, sort of immunity to hunger and alcohol. You can drink a lot and cold. And his courageousness in battle.

Yeah.

So we do get the idea that, you know, again, this comes back to the end of Diotima, that giving birth to virtue in the presence of beauty, that that's something that Socrates has successfully done, that virtue. So if we want to talk about practical application, there is the sense of virtue or excellence that Socrates is supposed to embody.

But his praise of Socrates, isn't it a little bit like Agathon's in that Socrates is the greatest of all things

we don't know how seriously to take. Yeah, yeah.

He tells this story that Socrates can. That when they're in battle. They were in this battle and it was the worst winter ever. And whenever they would go outside their tents, they'd bind their feet and try to stay as warm as possible. Socrates would walk out in tunic and bare feet as if it didn't matter to him anything at all. And that he could drink as much as he possibly anybody would give him. He never gets drunk, he never tires. And in fact, at the end of the dialogue, he's the only one that stays up all night, walks away, spends the. The day in the lyceum and then goes home.

1:50:07 Mark Linsenmayer: We hear all those same facts in that Alcibiades voice. It would sound much more dreamy. It's like, Jesus, I think we've reached the point where we, like the end of the dialogue must have a great sea of revelers pouring through the front door and join us. And so we have a mic that we're going to activate so that somebody can come up of you and you know, ask a question, make a comment. Especially I think it would be appropriate to hear from a few people what you think of this symposium, what we've been talking about this whole time. So come on up.

1:50:45 Seth: I have one specific question that I thought.

1:50:46 Wes: Sorry.

1:50:47 Mark Linsenmayer: Okay, Kylie. Okay.

1:50:49 Philosophy: In the beginning you talked about shame for part of love.

1:50:53 Seth: Did they view shame as immoral love? Like, would that be characterized as the same thing?

1:50:58 Mark Linsenmayer: Like, it would be immoral for them to be pederast? Even though that's something you talked about a lot. It's not shame of being a pederast. It's shame because the person who loves you is watching you and you don't want to do something embarrassing. So it's actually supposed to be a good shame.

1:51:13 Philosophy: So do they have immoral love?

1:51:15 Seth: Do they think of love as immoral or moral?

1:51:18 Wes: Well, that discussion in Pausanias, right, is between the ignoble and the noble kinds of love, right?

1:51:23 Mark Linsenmayer: If it's just lust, if it's just what Alcibiades was doing, apparently, then that. That is the.

1:51:29 Wes: So Phaedrus, before we get the noble, before we get the noble ignoble love, we get the shame. And Phaedrus, shame is about. Shame and pride are about encouraging. You know, it's what you feel before the person you love that makes you do good things.

And it doesn't get talked about so much in here. Right? But even though eros is the activity that is directed towards the good and always towards the good, Socrates will say, and Plato in his voice will say that we never truly desire anything that is not good. So. And it might be a. To the extent that we do bad things, it's a misalignment of our desire.

And the other thing you think about shame. I think you want to think about the concept of conscience or pride, which is the other thing Phaedrus talks about. You know, you want to think about the more positive side of conscience, which is ambition and people wanting to do great, great things or having certain ideals. And those two things are really, are erotic phenomena, even though they may not seem It. So conscience is something that arises in the context of love relations. You know, we think of them as, you know, between parents and children, but that's the way conscience does arise. Yep.

1:52:46 Mark Linsenmayer: Tim, come on up.

1:52:47 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking about this question of how appropriate it is to take any of this metaphysically. It's a question of whether we should just read it sort of at the human level and the psychological level. And the barrier that seems to come up again and again is this assumption that Plato's ultimate metaphysics is both static and complete. I wonder if there's room in Plato's thoughts. I guess a question a little more generally beyond just this text, for a metaphysics of incompleteness where this lack is still somehow available and present in the world. It's not just a human psychological thing. Or do we think that Plato really would say, no, the one, the. The good is total, complete. Whether it's fixed or not, I don't know. But that really lack has no place in metaphysics.

1:53:39 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, I guess it depends.

1:53:40 Philosophy: What.

1:53:40 Mark Linsenmayer: If you're talking about metaphysics, it's sort of. What's the ultimate ontological layer, then? Yeah, it's the static. But if you expand that to what we actually experience, then like Wes was saying, then he's Heraclitean in his account of the empirical world.

1:53:56 Wes: Maybe. So the question we were making him out to be, where I was a sort of process philosopher, is that legitimate? I don't.

1:54:03 Mark Linsenmayer: But I like the idea of an existential, depressing ontology of incompleteness. But I don't know what figure

1:54:12 Seth: I would say. I would say Plato probably didn't think there was room for lack in his metaphysics, but I think Derrida did.

1:54:19 Wes: I heard you talking a lot about dynamism. So would you say he. He would say the relationships between the forms as they participate in the one Right. At that level, is there room for saying he might have allowed for a dynamism in a system of forms, the highest forms?

1:54:36 Philosophy: I don't know.

1:54:37 Seth: Well, I think even before you get to a relationship between different forms, which I think is a really complex and difficult topic, think about the relationship between the form and the individual or the instantiations or the. The actual concrete things in the world that participate in the form. And how would you characterize that relationship? That in itself is very problematic and I think has some of this inherent tension in it that you have to kind of address before you even get to that level.

1:55:05 Wes: I like that a lot. So would you say, like, you know, we all give the triangle speech Right. That the triangle doesn't change. And this is one of the ways in which he demonstrates the eternal. But is the triangle coming complete in and of itself or does it also lack, you know, it's defined, it's not everything. So as a form, is it. Does it need to participate?

1:55:24 Seth: In my opinion, there has to be something that participates in the form for that form to have any. If I was a form and there were nothing concrete out in the world that was instantiating or existing me, then I would feel somehow incomplete.

1:55:35 Wes: No, absolutely. But at the other level, that there are triangles, but there are also circles. Right. And they participate in something in the one.

1:55:43 Dylan: Yeah.

1:55:44 Philosophy: So questions like these questions like the

1:55:47 Wes: answers we don't know are what?

1:55:48 Philosophy: And they're what Aristotle used to sink Platonic metaphysics.

1:55:52 Wes: Exactly.

1:55:52 Philosophy: Right. So like. Yeah, that's a good question. And one that Aristotle was like. And you don't have answers for those, so you're onto something. And that something was like Aristotle was like, Yep, that's great question. Isn't that the question?

1:56:07 Seth: Thanks, Tim, for bringing, bringing Aristotle into the conversation. Name dropper.

1:56:12 Wes: But that's also, I guess you'd have to go to the text and have some other kinds of arguments about it. But a dialogue like the symposium makes me really want to focus on the activity of being a philosopher that Socrates embodied and less on what the status of the forms are. It makes me feel like there is a metaphysical account of the forms, but that is far less important for Socrates in the end than the activity of what he's doing and how that's playing out. It's almost like it could be a myth. It could be like the myth of Er or Aristophanes myth or something like that. It could have that kind of status because what really is important in the end is the activity that he's going through.

1:56:56 Mark Linsenmayer: Right. Stuff we don't see until we're dead, until we're out of the cave. And so the most we can say is some kind of vague stuff, but

1:57:03 Wes: they're concepts that also sort of functions like a limit in calculus and an infinitesimal in calculus, depending on which way you go. And you can always ask these questions about, well, the infinitesimal is paradoxical or is there really the limit? But their sort of problematic nature doesn't eliminate the fact that they serve their functions. They serve their functions mathematically and they serve their functions.

1:57:26 Mark Linsenmayer: Let's keep the folks coming up and we'll try not to have a 15 minute conversation in response to each question.

1:57:32 Seth: I really liked what you guys are saying about the static of that dynamic

1:57:35 Philosophy: in the third term you guys are trying to talk about. And I. I don't mean to drop a name, but I find it really helpful.

1:57:41 Seth: Dylan said that the.

1:57:42 Philosophy: Dylan's not.

1:57:44 Wes: That's okay.

1:57:45 Seth: You can drop Dylan's name.

1:57:47 Wes: That's okay.

1:57:49 Philosophy: The Dylanian concept of.

1:57:54 Seth: You said the lover is the third term and that. I was really thinking this was Kierkegaard's. The relation that relates itself to itself. He's saying the self is that dynamic third term.

1:58:05 Philosophy: So maybe the best way to understand it, like you're saying, is not to

1:58:08 Seth: think about it in this big metaphysics way, but just the ontology of the self going forward towards goals, towards something that they need to achieve. Is that a helpful thing at all?

1:58:19 Wes: Yeah, I think I don't have anything. Daniel Kierkegaard, expert.

1:58:23 Seth: Did you have any, by the way? I had the same thought. I made the same connection. Did you? Yeah.

1:58:30 Mark Linsenmayer: Cool.

1:58:30 Philosophy: Yeah, it's a good thought, Seth. You don't just have a name here,

1:58:33 Seth: though, because it's not just his concept.

1:58:35 Philosophy: He's saying what Dylan's saying.

1:58:36 Seth: It's not a big metaphysical point.

1:58:38 Philosophy: The third term is the lover.

1:58:40 Wes: It's the philosopher.

1:58:42 Philosophy: So the philosopher is not just this,

1:58:44 Seth: you know, like you guys are saying,

1:58:45 Mark Linsenmayer: oh, he's got this profession.

1:58:46 Seth: Philosopher is the person who's okay with being dynamic and going forward and accepting that kind of task.

1:58:52 Philosophy: I guess it seems like Kierkegaard was doing something like, almost one level deeper where he was saying, like, the self just is this process. And Plato seems to be saying. Or Socrates seems to be saying something more like, love is a process that a person does. And so that might be, like, the difference between the two, but I think they seem related.

1:59:14 Seth: That's a good way to put it.

1:59:16 Wes: It's explicitly brought up in the Symposium, the idea of being a poet. And the word in Greek, a poiesis, means to be a maker. And that has a analogical meaning across all kinds of things. But to be a poet would mean to write verse and meter and stuff like that. So that activity of being a person who is a maker or a lover would be some similar kind of thing.

Yeah.

1:59:40 Mark Linsenmayer: All right, thanks, Jeremy. And now Daniel is going to step to the mic, and if you have anything to say about Kierkegaard, feel free, as long as it is brief. And then you're going to read a question.

1:59:50 Dylan: Yeah, I think I'll do the audience a favor and spare them my thoughts on Kierkegaard, but I thought that was a good point. So I'll at least give that thumbs up to the question. But I would like to take an opportunity to share some questions that are coming in live from around the world. And I've got a question here from Angela McLaughlin in Australia about Diotima. In the symposium, she had a two part related question. One, do you folks feel that Diotima was a real historical character at this time or was she a literary construct? Wouldn't necessarily expect you guys to have an answer to that since it seems to be an open question.

But just curious if you had any thoughts on this. Perhaps more to the point though, if she is a literary construct, it is sort of a bizarrely hyper masculine discussion about the. The nature of love. You do have this introduction of basically one female character other than the flute girl, I suppose. Do you guys have any thoughts on what she was meant to represent in the question of love? And you know, Angela throws out a thought here. She says perhaps Diotima has been brought in as a means of expressing the giving of birth, an activity linked to females.

But is there anything beyond that to say? Yeah, because it seems like that's not.

2:00:56 Wes: It is the return of the flute. The flute girl is excluded. Reproductivity is initially excluded. Of course, to bring back reproductivity, if that's the point of love, you have to bring back femininity. Right.

Well, it's another manifestation of Socrates claim of being a midwife also. So this language of reproduction, of giving birth, of gaining immortality through that, and of searching for knowledge as being pregnant, all of that language is throughout the dialogue. Sure. And the manifestation in this case with Diotima, I don't know that it particularly matters if she's actually real or not. If it's a myth that Socrates is telling. I think in fact it doesn't become more or less interesting if she's actually real.

Right.

I don't think.

2:01:43 Mark Linsenmayer: I think the fact that she's a priestess, and I will give Linda Walsh, our recent guest, credit for this insight. But that female and priestess, it's the gods, it's other. It's a language that, you know, you guys talking in this symposium aren't going to solve this. We need something more God connected to hook us up with the correct answer.

2:02:05 Seth: Well, and I think it's also very much a slap in the face of all of the speeches and all of the thought before that the masculine was the only option for virtue and all this, this sort of thing.

2:02:18 Dylan: Well, I'm glad you put it that way. I'm gonna inject myself into this. And without asking for a normative comment from you guys on this, it does seem to me to sort of invert that. Yes. He's saying, well, hey, women have a role to play here too. Except for the fact that it seems to me that the only role that women seem to have a play in this concept is just their utility for reproduction. Unless that's a misinterpretation.

2:02:38 Philosophy: Let two pederasts go first.

2:02:40 Dylan: No, no, no.

2:02:41 Seth: But the model of the older male lover and the younger male lover. What Socrates is doing here is saying, well, you know who my lover was, right? Woman priestess, you know, and just that completely undercuts the whole notion that the. All the stuff that came before where the only way that that virtue can be transmitted is between male and male.

2:03:00 Wes: She's clearly not historical though, because she responds directly to things in the previous version.

Oh yeah, that's true.

Love is not, you know, about finding your. Your other half. You know, she says that.

2:03:09 Seth: Sure, sure.

2:03:11 Wes: As if she overheard.

2:03:13 Seth: The point is. The point is just.

2:03:15 Wes: And this was not a speech that erst.

But that doesn't matter because clearly, I mean, clearly the point is it's a very obvious, you know, way of rejecting the focus on masculinity and men.

2:03:26 Mark Linsenmayer: So although still bringing in the only female as the exotic fictional other is still super sexy.

2:03:34 Dylan: I'm trying to.

2:03:35 Wes: You could make that argument no matter what.

2:03:37 Mark Making Music: What happened.

2:03:38 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm trying to get away from the

2:03:39 Dylan: idea of like how super sexist it is that I think that kind of goes without saying. I don't think we have to go into the mores of ancient Greece. To me, the issue is, it strikes me as odd. Unless it's just. This is sort of a quirk of Plato himself. Why is it that that's sort of the only mention of it? You know, Seth, you point out, well, Socrates injects this in order to be able to undercut the prior arguments. Except for the fact that why is that even necessary? Why is this the one. One person to whom this seems to be obvious?

2:04:04 Seth: Right. So what does that say?

2:04:06 Dylan: What is Plato saying about this group? Or what can we derive from Greek attitudes at the time? It's not so much from a judgmental sense of just trying to get in their heads of what. Why is that being brought in as such a unique insight?

2:04:17 Seth: I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't honestly know the answer to that question. But I can say, yeah, Plato could have written another dialogue that was between Diotima and Socrates. Socrates, right. He could have taken a very different tack. He could have featured female characters in other dialogues. And yet. And yet.

2:04:36 Dylan: Right.

2:04:37 Seth: Nonetheless.

2:04:38 Wes: The way Greek society was at the

2:04:40 Seth: time, nonetheless, I think there's something meaningful in the choice. If you believe how many people, again, have read this before the. Did anybody notice the kind of dissonance when we went from kind of the speech giving, verse like approach to suddenly the injection of the Socratic questioning approach when Socrates. And you're like. You realize how tedious and painful it is to read that. Right? And you were thankful. You were thankful when it went. And then even we got averted. And I think that's indicative of the fact that Plato is a master stylist.

And when you read this, every choice he makes is a conscious choice. And so I think we have to give some level of credence to the fact that he made a decision to bring this in. Then even in the commentary that I read about it, you know, saying how the expectation was, if you were following the model of the way these things were supposed to go, he should have just stopped right before the Diotima piece. But he doesn't. And the fact that he makes all these conscious decisions, he injects this thing in here, this isn't like Aristotle's students taking notes and cobbling together.

This is. There's some integrity to the text that there's a reason for it and you got to take it seriously. And that's kind of, you know, the sort of generous way of approaching it. So now, what we make of it, fortunately, since I'm not married to authorial intent, I can interpret this any way I want. In which case that's what I. I think. He's a feminist. Diotima was the first radical feminist in philosophy. How's that, Daniel?

2:06:08 Dylan: Very good.

2:06:08 Seth: All right, all right.

2:06:10 Mark Linsenmayer: Anybody else want to get up here? Maybe one last person.

2:06:14 Wes: Okay.

2:06:14 Mark Linsenmayer: We have two last people. We had simultaneous hands.

2:06:18 Dylan: Yeah.

2:06:19 Seth: So I just.

2:06:19 Mark Making Music: This is Nick.

2:06:20 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, Nick.

2:06:21 Wes: So I just want to thank you

guys for the project that you do

2:06:24 Seth: and the time that you take because,

2:06:25 Wes: like, I'm not a philosophy guy, and it's just really great every week to get exposed to new ideas and thinkers and everything. So just thanks a lot, guys.

2:06:33 Seth: Yeah, thank you.

2:06:34 Mark Linsenmayer: Appreciate it. Come on up.

2:06:41 Seth: I don't know that I'm clapping for the rest.

2:06:42 Mark Linsenmayer: Introduce yourself. I can't read your name tag.

2:06:45 Wes: My name's Dennis Phillips, and I was trained in mathematics, and I can see some parallels to philosophy. I went into math Max because I

2:06:55 Philosophy: thought it was the end all know all. And then when I got up to

2:06:59 Wes: my final defense, I realized they were going to send me out on the street without having job talent.

2:07:07 Mark Linsenmayer: But fortunately I had familiar with that

2:07:09 Wes: and I knew how to grid satellite images and I was able to make up for that. And I regard this as a dynamic between the ideal and the real life. And that you can have your ideals but you have to make your compromises. And when you fall in love you will find that the person that you're with is not your perfect corresponding partner, nor are you. And you have to work that out. And that's part of the dynamics. So thank you for giving this.

2:07:44 Seth: Thank you.

2:07:45 Wes: Thank you.

Absolutely.

Sure. Did we have any more online questions?

2:07:51 Mark Linsenmayer: Yes, we should ask another.

2:07:53 Dylan: Sure. Why don't we start with a more open ended question because maybe people are even using this as an opportunity to just ask you guys questions generally. I've got a question here from Pepe Silvia, who's asking which philosophical position, whether it be realism, anti realism, et cetera, do you hold in respect to the entities posited by the natural sciences?

2:08:12 Mark Linsenmayer: Missionary? I don't know. Next question.

2:08:19 Dylan: Is there a philosophical theory that you find utterly distasteful?

2:08:23 Mark Linsenmayer: Yours?

2:08:27 Dylan: I've got one from Michael Burgess.

2:08:28 Seth: Objectivism,

2:08:31 Philosophy: Philosophical theories. We've already.

2:08:33 Mark Making Music: Oh, sorry.

2:08:34 Wes: Let's hear from Michael Burgess.

2:08:35 Dylan: Yeah, Michael Burgess emails in, he says here sort of a multi part question he throws in.

2:08:41 Seth: That was a shocker, right?

2:08:44 Dylan: Love as an ontological principle can be bound up in gendered metaphysics and cosmologies. In the beginning a man had sex with a woman and out of their unity arose the world, etc. End quote. What's the best or most accurate or generous interpretation of this kind of metaphysics? Phenomenological or political? Moral? Or is it some sort of genuine realist commitment?

2:09:03 Wes: Psychological.

2:09:04 Mark Linsenmayer: Excellent answer. I like political moral. If you have to choose one of those things. If they're going to be talking about Pausanias, the bad version of love and the good version of love. And the way Seth presented it was that these were both daughters of something. But I thought I remember very clearly, you know, just the fact that the low one is androgynous and the high one is male. Only like that.

2:09:24 Seth: No, no, no. It had to do with the parents, not with the Aphrodite itself.

2:09:27 Wes: Okay, but I think when I say psychological, I mean that I think with Freud and psychoanalysis and contemporary psychology that's been influenced by that, you'll see lots of things that will remind you of the symposium and this so you don't have to take it metaphysically. Right. Physically, the idea of female principles, or whatever you want to say about it, being present in all human beings and having a dynamic relationship.

2:09:53 Dylan: Excellent. Michael continues. Michael will wrap up shortly. Comment Almost definitional of pagan theology are principles which transcend the gods that they have to conform to the gods are just, et cetera. I wonder if Seth considers this radical because of Abrahamic theology in which there are no principles which are separate from the will of God. Not so sure that's the case, but let's throw that out there. Question what is the better theology for us today? Should we try to rehabilitate pagan theology?

2:10:23 Seth: Oh God. All right, so 15 minutes or less. Listen, I'm not going to touch the rehabilitating pagan theology, but I will say that if you want to talk about Abrahamic religion, it's not the case that God decides what's good. At least not strictly speaking. There's a saying in Judaism that you love the Torah more than God, and what that means is that you love the revealed word more than you love the idea or the personification of God. And to the extent that God writes down these commandments, he is committed to that covenant in the same way that you are. And to that extent it's absolutely not true that after that God can change the rules and or decide what's good. Once he enters into the contract, it's binding. So I don't think that's a fair characterization of that particular type of relationship.

2:11:13 Wes: Sounds good.

2:11:14 Seth: All right, thanks everybody.

2:11:21 Mark Making Music: Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Dan.

2:11:23 Philosophy: Thank you, Josh.

2:11:24 Wes: Thank you all for coming out.

Thanks for coming.

2:11:27 Mark Linsenmayer: 1, 2.

2:11:41 Mark Making Music: Hey ho watcha go Hit my memory with a passing glow Changing what I think I don't know for you fine fade passing times steal my senses with a glossy grime Drawn in full and resting my mind on you I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel like you won't look back on me and feel you have to look away. You when I was mine Come off empty with an absent line maybe the ears will take off the shine from you Love, loss after touch Pray the premise won't amount too much Pretty darn free but left in the clutch of you I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel I you won't look back on me and crack on me and fade down into black on me and wither into fact on me and feel you have to look Away.

Hey ho what you go wipe my memory with a glancing blow. Changing what I don't care to know for you. I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, hope I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope, I feel, I hope.

2:14:34 Mark Linsenmayer: So that's not actually hoping. It's feeling like maybe you hope. This is called find you out because we are all fakers in some degree, to some extent. And they're gonna find out.

2:14:48 Mark Making Music: They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you. Wow. They're gonna find you.

2:15:06 Dylan: Wow.

2:15:09 Mark Making Music: You built it, they bought it. So flawed and contradictory. But they don't know the half of it. You hope they never will. You willed it, you want it? A part of you embraces what stands out upon your face is just the tip of your nose. Though you ought to clear yourself out so you're fit to be seen. You think it's much too late for that. And you can never be clean. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. You did it, you done it. You went and followed through. And now it's seeking light through you and it cannot be denied. You use it, you ooze it.

2:15:54 Mark Linsenmayer: Your inner core will choose it and

2:15:56 Mark Making Music: you're never gonna lose it.

2:15:57 Mark Linsenmayer: Cause it's gotten inside Though you want

2:15:59 Mark Making Music: to clear yourself out so you're bored to be seen. You think it's much too late for that. And you can never be clean? You're gonna find? They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. You're hiding in the open. You're holding place to not be seen. You choose your words so carefully. One slip and you'll die. You're in it, you own it. This trip you come along. Unclench your lips the hum of song is quiet. Each new to cry. Though you'd like to open up to someone Share it around. You've got to keep on missing. You can never be found. They're gonna. They're gonna find you? They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. They're gonna find you out. And when they do all their faces they're gonna beat you t.

2:17:38 Philosophy: Sa.

2:18:07 Mark Making Music: They're going to find you out. They're going to find you out. They're going to find you.

2:18:33 Philosophy: No.

2:18:33 Mark Linsenmayer: You

2:18:36 Philosophy: all right?

2:18:37 Mark Linsenmayer: This is called adds up to nothing. It's about how other people just won't do what you want.

2:19:00 Mark Making Music: You want what you want and I want what I want. You want your want but I want your wants. And it all adds up to nothing all adds up to nothing. You need what you need but I need what you need. You want what you need but I need a kind of need that you want believe in if I spelled it out in blood that you couldn't believe in if it caused a flood but it all adds up to nothing all

2:20:01 Seth: adds up to nothing

2:20:05 Mark Making Music: well, it all adds up to nothing all adds up to nothing. What makes people cling together what makes people sing together is a whole lot of loneliness and I think that you're born to this. It takes different eyes to see that something makes us rise to be that hole for yourself be enough for yourself and it all adds up to nothing all adds up to nothing well, it all adds up to nothing. All that jobs are not bad. You want what you want and I want what I want. Your wants don't add up but I've got to just shut up. And it all adds up to nothing all adds up to nothing well, it all adds up to nothing. It all adds up to nothing. Ray. Ray. I hate your violin.

2:22:19 Mark Linsenmayer: Please play Cajon for the next song instead. It's like in drama. See, it's like the symposium.

2:22:36 Mark Making Music: I don't know how to fix myself so I can look like you want me to work.

2:22:40 Mark Linsenmayer: I try to keep you at the

2:22:41 Mark Making Music: top of my mind but my mind is no top my bottom out again. What can I do for your love that I can help? I would die for your love but that wouldn't help. I can't believe it would be any easier for you if I took all my problems and just stayed away from you. So we're in for the long haul and all I want is an easy ride. I'm sorry I don't always say them right thing to do what you want me to do. What can I do for you calling right now? It's only the moments I'm off my guard that seem to count. I know what life would be any easy for you if I took all my problems and put them all on you. But I don't take you for granted. I don't know what that means if it's just something you've invented well, it's the last thing that we need.

2:24:00 Mark Linsenmayer: I don't know if I can fix

2:24:01 Mark Making Music: myself So I work like you want me to work I can make little gestures but my first your face will

2:24:07 Mark Linsenmayer: give away that it's me I'll be

2:24:11 Mark Making Music: here for you, darling this moment, this minute right now it's only the moments I'm off my guard that seem to count I know a lifetime of moments is harder than a man of less Than steady hands could give But I'll give you this one and the next and maybe you can adjust your expectations Because I don't take you for granted I don't know what that means Just something you've invented it's got us bursting at the seams so please, please give me some credit Even if it's more than I deserved I'm dished in for the long course and it's all that I can serve so thank you. Give me seven more chances Give me 60 more years to prove I'm into your dances and to show you I can feel you. All right.

2:25:39 Mark Linsenmayer: The next song is brand new. I actually wrote it to try to get Lucy Lawless to sing it, but she didn't. She hasn't had time yet, so I'm gonna do it instead. I think she's act. No, she's not here.

2:25:57 Mark Making Music: In place of a soul I've got tendency gotta lean in I got energy well I push head along into a tumbling world of my own of my own well I don't know what I am driving I am pressing the cheese I am using what's left of my periphery I am forward essentially I am motion and force and something to too fast to see and my eyes focus out to a point and refract and I will reach every door Nothing fails to react and I will overcome all the crap that I drag I am not asking the world I am not asking the world I demand it, I insist if I must give a reason well consider this fist I demand it I require you mistake what I make

2:26:51 Mark Linsenmayer: and all the love I inspire A

2:26:54 Mark Making Music: place of a soul I got irony in the space of a conscience A rock in this piece my belief is a 15 ton truck if I hold out my hand you will shiver, you'll shiver I am driving, I am pressing it down if I fly at the speed I will be sleeping around I am forward, I am all the way I'm a mistake of the future we'll all be someday and my eyes focus out to a point and refract and I will pierce every door Nothing fails to react and I will overcome all the traps that I drag I am not asking the world I am not asking the world, I demand it, I insist. If I must give a reason, well consider this fist, I demand it, I require you mistake what I make and all the love I inspire.

Don't be put out a fool, don't cover yourself and drool. I'm a person, a person and not a force of nature. Don't be one of those guys who puts feet in his mouth. I am lonely and done. I won't save you, won't save you. I demand it, I insist. If I must give a reason, well consider this fist, I demand it, I require you mistake what I make and all the love I inspire and my eyes focus out to a point and refract and retract and turn black and go back and attack and relax and distract and attract and react and react

2:28:42 Mark Linsenmayer: and react and react and react and

2:28:45 Mark Making Music: react and react and react.

2:28:47 Wes: That.