Ep. 298: Marsilio Ficino on Love (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 298 is something like, what is the role of love in the universe? And we read Marsilio Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love from 1475. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, perpetual kindling, new delights by my own peculiar ardor in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, desperately trying to return to God in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, closer to poverty than to plenty in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Peter: And our special guest today is Peter Adamson. Hi, guys.

0:52 Seth: Hello.

0:52 Peter: I'm here in Munich, Germany, without my own object of love, which would be a nice cold beer, even though I'm in Bavaria. I'm not sure how that happens.

1:01 Mark: I think that beer would make you transcend, it would bring on the divine madness, and it would make you transcend its own material essence.

1:09 Peter: That would be good podcasting material, though. So it's a bit of a shame, really.

1:13 Mark: Well, at the beginning of most episodes, we all drop acid and then we transcend our physical bodies.

1:20 Wes: It's the key to the success of the show.

1:22 Peter: Explains a lot, actually.

1:23 Wes: Divine madness.

1:25 Peter: I'm sure I'm not the only listener who is not surprised.

1:29 Mark: So you had put out this book, which this is what, the seventh? How many books have you put out that just packaged together your philosophy audio? That's the sixth, the sixth book, Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. And this is the first one that the publisher sent me, the actual final bound version. I've had a couple others where they send me this, like, cheap red looking fake binding. Oh, I don't know if I should pay attention to that. But this one, it occurred to me, flipping through it, we've never done anything any of these philosophers on this show, despite 13 years.

So I reached out to Peter and said, what is the one Renaissance philosopher? Since we've done nothing in the Renaissance, a couple of things sort of adjacent to it, you know, Machiavelli and Bacon and things sort of in the general neighborhood, but actual Renaissance, who would be the person? And you picked this Ficino, strangely, a commentary. And it seemed we're about to reach our episode 300, so we're sort of doing a few things in celebration and reflection of that. And our episode 100, our first live show was on Plato's Symposium. So returning to that dialogue through this account seemed a fun thing to do.

Can you say, why Ficino? Why you consider this so central to the Renaissance?

2:39 Peter: Well, I actually would say that you haven't skipped the Renaissance, because I definitely consider Machiavelli to be a Renaissance thinker. The Prince is written only a decade or two after Ficino's death.

2:50 Mark: Okay.

2:51 Peter: But in a way, you're right, because Machiavelli is not in any way a representative Renaissance philosopher. He is a representative Renaissance philosopher in that he's going back to antiquity, and he's drawing on Roman historians quite a lot, especially Livy. He wrote a set of discourses on Livy, which are his most important work, aside from the famous Prince, which is what you guys discuss.

3:14 Mark: I believe we discuss both, but yeah.

3:16 Peter: So the thing that's unusual about Machiavelli, of course, is that he has this cynical take on politics. He has a particular point of view which is so idiosyncratic that we still use the word Machiavellian to describe it. Whereas Ficino really does represent what we might think of as the flourishing of Italian humanism, which is not the only thing to think about if you're thinking about philosophy in the 15th and 16th century. In fact, the book that you're talking about there, which is based on my podcast, the part of my podcast that was about Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy, it actually only covers the Renaissance in Italy.

So now in my podcast, I'm doing the rest of Europe in the 15th and 16th century. And if you start thinking about that, then actually the main action is all around the Protestant Reformation, because the Protestant Reformation's coming just a generation after Ficino. So he dies in 1499, and the Reformation really breaks out in the 1520s. But I think the high point of philosophy in the 15th century is really the recovery of ancient philosophical sources in Italy. And it's intimately connected to the other thing I cover in that book, which is Byzantine philosophy.

So, I mean, to make a long story short, there are all these Byzantine scholars who you might already think of as humanists, except that they're reading works of antiquity in their native language, which is Greek, whereas the Italian humanists need to come to grips with it and write about it in Latin. And for a variety of reasons, Greek scholars start bringing manuscripts to Italy, and also Western scholars start going to Byzantium and fetching manuscripts or copying them. And also Greek scholars begin to teach Greek to Italians. That also happen in France to some extent, but Italy is really the epicenter of it.

So you have people like Ficino who wind up learning Greek at an Incredibly high level and are able to do very impressive philological work on these Greek manuscripts. And the thing that's really important about Ficino, and that makes him the most central figure in this whole story, is that he is the one who translated Plato into Latin. And something else that's important to remember about the late 15th century is that this is when books start being printed. And in fact, I think if I were going to point to the sort of Renaissance period and say what the most important thing that happens with the history of philosophy, the competition would be between humanism, the Reformation and the rise of the printing press.

And with Ficino, you get two of those three, right. So you get this massive humanist project, and you get a humanist project that can extend its tentacles all over Europe, because he doesn't just translate Plato, he translates Plato and sees it printed. And this printed edition of Plato's works in Latin is then printed over and over for the coming century and more right across Europe. So right through the 16th century, you've got thousands of people reading Plato in Latin, and what they're reading is printed editions of Ficino's translations.

6:24 Mark: So what'd you guys think? Wes, I thought you were the biggest fan of Malebranche when we covered him. That I thought as another link in this Plato rationalist chain. You got through the whole reading. You said it's like 100 plus pages.

6:37 Wes: Yeah, it's easier if you skip the footnotes. Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot. It was interesting to see Ficino's trying to reconcile the Symposium with a more Christian view of the world. The commentary, I think, is illuminating because of that. So there's some creative interpretations here, for instance, of various things that happen in the dialogue and some interpretations which really run against the thrust of the dialogue. So, for instance of Aristophanes, where the desire for union with one's other half is interpreted as a desire to rediscover the divine light in a way as a reunion with God, when that's sort of a saving of the appearances, really.

Aristophanes is setting up Socrates. It's the Socrates' principal foil. And each previous speaker, in their own way in the Symposium, is saying things which seem right, but each of them, in a way Socrates is going to object to in the final speech, in which he focuses on the way in which love involves privation and the way in which it involves reproduction and regeneration, which is a point that is thematic throughout this commentary, I think, in a way that it's not really emphasized until we get to Socrates and the Symposium, the idea, the sort of reproductive element of love.

So anyway, I thought it was illuminating to see a commentary which is trying to reconcile the symposium with the religious developments that have come after it, and then also to save some of the points of the previous speakers in a way. I don't think they're necessarily saved in the actual dialogue itself. So.

8:23 Mark: Right. Just a structural comment that.

8:26 Seth: Right.

8:26 Mark: You think that the symposium, as you just said, is structured so that the good stuff comes at the end. But here Ficino, though, he's talking in order. You know, he has a. It's sort of a meta dialogue. So it's like Ficino and his friends around a table, recreating, just like we did in our episode 100. One person, one of his friends. And he doesn't really go into like the personalities of these friends. Peter, you know, you commented on your episode that there's like some of them are covered on your other episodes like they were Renaissance philosophers, so there's stuff to be known about them, but we don't care for this purpose.

But Ficino just regards all of them, all the speakers in Plato's dialogue, as speaking Plato's actual views. They're just different aspects of love. And so he's like trying to interpret them all so that they will all line up with his own theological interpretation. So that is just given actually very much front loaded, so that by the time you get to his take on Socrates speech, it's. It's some new stuff coming here and there, especially some weird medical stuff toward the end. But mostly it's just sort of samey samey. Like we already got his theory of love, his metaphysical picture, mostly taken from Plotinus, out pretty early on in the thing.

So Peter was nice enough to say, oh yeah, you don't have to read this whole 120, 20 pages. Which I did get through the whole thing. Seth, I know you didn't. Do you have any initial reactions before we get into it?

9:44 Seth: You brought up the point that the structure and the flow of the symposium, I always thought, is a series of entertaining and rejecting. And this is not that. Like he is trying to recover all the positions or at least identify how they can be interpreted in his framework in a way where they're all speaking truth at the very least, if not the whole truth. I'm Jewish and I rarely get excited about Christian philosophy, as it were, but I wondered if this wasn't kind of the paradigmatic case of casuistry. And I don't mean that pejoratively. I mean if he was the one who first won because I watched a YouTube video out there from some Christian foundation, Jesuit maybe, and there's a guy does a whole thing on Ficino and then he focused on this text as well and kind of walks through it a really interesting, not super interesting in the way it was presented, but the content was interesting.

And this idea almost that if you take seriously the revelation, the idea that Plato came before the good news was delivered, and taking seriously the project of saying, well, we're not just going to throw that away because it's pre revelation, instead God wouldn't have created Plato and done all the things and there's obvious truth in the Platonic writings that he wants to bring out. It's a phenomenal project. I mean it's unbelievable that he put that much time, he translated all those works. He also wrote what like 15 or 20 other books on a variety of subjects.

And it's a massive accomplishment, even if I'm ultimately not interested in the angelic mind and Jupiter and Saturn and all that stuff. So I enjoyed it as a project and I think that's the level at which I'll probably stay at. This conversation is just sort of the moves and the, the reasoning, but the actual outcome is less interesting to me.

11:40 Mark: So casuistry, sophistry, clever but unsound reasoning.

11:44 Seth: No, no, no, no, no, no. That's the pejorative interpretation. The non pejorative interpretation is that you're seeking to resolve a problem by extension from a particular case to a new case.

11:56 Wes: Yeah. And it's, it's the most charitable possible reading. Trying to get the most out of the dialogue. It's one that maximizes consistency within the dialogue between speeches when like I said, I think there's more tension between the Socratic position of the other positions and then is here in the commentary. But also maximize consistency with a Christian worldview which is not in and of itself casuistry or sophisticated thing like that.

12:24 Peter: So what's interesting to me that you are both picking up on the Christian theme so strongly because clearly that's there. But I think that Ficino in general and in this work also he's in a way got a problem which is that his approach is not very Christian by the standards of this day. So what he really is is a Neoplatonist. Right. So this scheme that keeps coming up over and over, as Mark said, where you have these five sort of levels of reality, so you have God, the angelic mind, which is the same thing as Plotinus's universal intellect and Then soul, right in the middle is a kind of mediating factor between the lower physical world and the higher divine world.

And then below soul you have quality, which is what gives determination to bodies. And then all the way at the bottom you've got matter. So you've got five things. God, mind, soul, quality, matter, which is basically Plotinus system, but made a little bit neater to put soul right in the middle. So that keeps coming up over and over. And that's not a distinctively Christian thing at all. I mean, obviously he's talking about angels and of course he's talking about God. But Plotinus has a first principle who you can think of as God. And he doesn't call the universal intellect an angel, but it's doing the same metaphysical work.

So if anything, I guess I usually think of Ficino as someone who was defensive about the fact that, as he well knew, he was essentially resurrecting a kind of pagan set of philosophical ideas. And remember, he also writes about things like demons, right, and magic and astrology. And he alludes to these things in this commentary and elsewhere he writes about them in much more extensive fashion. So that means that if anything, I mean, from our point of view, of course we read him and think, oh, this is really Christian, but in the 15th century and the 16th century people would probably have read him and thought, oh, this is pretty suspect.

Like, why is he so interested in these flagrantly pagan philosophers, like not just Plotinus, but like Iamblichus and Proclus, who are really upfront about their pagan religion and he's totally fascinated by them. So actually, I think there's several tensions. So that one is the tension between the Christianity and the pagan philosophical heritage, and the other is between the pagan philosophical heritage and Plato, because as you said, Plato's looking at the subject of love here in the Symposium from a variety of angles. And Ficino is following the Neoplatonists by trying to sort of force the whole text into a single body of doctrine, which he's getting from the Neoplatonists.

So that's the project. I think it's a sort of a three way negotiation between late ancient pagan philosophy, Plato and Christianity. And I think it's actually late ancient pagan philosophy that's got the real dominant role. And then the other two things, Plato and Christianity are being brought into harmony with that body of philosophical teaching. That's how I see it at least.

15:37 Mark: Maybe let's talk about that metaphysics first, because that is addressed right in the first, the analysis of the first speech in the reading. And there he talks about, you know, you've got God and you've got what he calls three chaos. So it's three things that need to be ordered sort of by the light of God, the absolute angelic mind, AKA the world spirit. And then you got the world soul and then you've got the world body,

16:01 Wes: which is the physical world in the angelic mind. I think we can just say that that's his translation of the world of Platonic forms or ideas.

16:11 Mark: Right? Because God has to be unity. Peter was first on this podcast talking about Parmenides with us. So we get some treatment of a little bit, I think very non serious treatment. I guess he's left it all the plotinus to maybe seriously grapple with this, but of how you can have a God that is one that is absolutely simple but yet you get a multiplicity of stuff out of that. We've had this problem all the way back to, you know, Plato and the Parmenides and you know, his dialogue, the Parmenides and thinking about how well somehow there's the singular form of goodness, but yet that is different aspects of these different virtues.

And so here we get metaphysical embodiments of this. And he even can use Peter, like you were saying, those pagan gods as names for different aspects of the forms, give us different models and we could just call this one, we'll call this one Mars because is how we learn about bravery or something like this. And so he can put the different Greek or Roman God names to say, oh, these are really just literally naming angels and they are literally related to the astrological, like the planets themselves. So you could do astrology, it's not mere metaphors.

So he can shove this all into a metaphysical system that is supposed to deal, is supposed to give detail to how we could get an idea of individual things out of the reflection from Platonic forms, which ultimately come from an indivisible one.

17:34 Wes: Mark, that's a really good point. Which in a way love becomes a way of explaining the problem of the one and the many, which is also the problem of participation, of being and becoming and the participation of particulars and forms. And I was reminded in many places of Hegel actually, because this I think is central. You know, we did the phenomenology recently and it's a central metaphysical problem or ontological problem in this phenomenology, the problem of the one and the many. And the answer in a way turns out to be the concept of recognition.

And here I think the work is being done by love. Although there are parts of this which sound very Hegelian. You know, the idea of finding oneself in the other. For instance, there are passages that I marked there that we'll get to later, I'm sure. I'm glad you highlighted that sort of metaphysical role for love and explaining how we go from a. From the one, from a unitary God and get everything else.

18:29 Peter: I mean, this is really like, in a way, the core issue of Platonism and certainly Neoplatonism. You have this single first principle which is completely simple, has no parts, no multiplicity, and then everything streams forth from it. And multiplicity has to come from somewhere. And one of the ways that they explain that is to say that it's not just that things are coming forward out of God like rays of light shining from a light source, they're also turning back towards their source. Right. I mean, in technical jargon, Neoplatonism scholars call this procession and reversion.

So there's a procession, a movement forth out of God, and then there's a reversion, where the things that have come out of God turn back towards him. And one of the ways, not the only way, but I think probably the main way that Ficino thinks about love in this dialogue, this commentary on a dialogue which is also a dialogue, is to think of love as the tendency of mind to try to go back to God and soul to try to go back to mind. So every level is trying to. Another word that Platonists use sometimes is revert. So every level is trying to revert back upon the level that it came from.

Sort of like trying to go back to your source or something. And they think about this sometimes in sort of geometrical metaphors, like sort of starting with a point and then going out in a circle and then coming back towards the point where you started, that sort of thing.

19:57 Seth: Can I read a passage to hit on these highlights? So, page 127, first full paragraph. In the beginning, God created the substance of the angelic mind, which we also call essence. This, in the first moment of its creation, was formless and dark. But since it was born from God, it turned towards God, its own source, with a certain innate desire. When turned towards God, it was illuminated by the glory of God himself. In the glow of his radiance, its own passion was set ablaze. When its whole passion was kindled, it drew close to God and in cleaving to him, assumed form.

For God, who is omnipotent, created in the angelic mind as it cleaved to him the forms of all things to be created in this mind, therefore, in some spiritual way was painted, so to speak. Everything which we sense in these bodies of the material world, in those forms were conceived the globes of heaven, the heaven of the elements, the stars, the kinds of vapors, the forms of stones, metals, plants and animals. These prototypes or forms, capital F, of everything conceived by the dispensation of God in the angelic mind are, we cannot doubt the ideas.

And that I think really neatly captures not just the structure but that point. Wes, you were talking about this notion that the reason why love is going to be first and foremost amongst all the gods is simply that love is the first motion of the universe and

21:25 Wes: also it's self completing, perfect love as God is perfect in himself.

21:31 Peter: Yeah, but it's Otis in that sense.

21:33 Seth: When I read this passage, I was thinking of an ancient Greek conception of Eros. If you think about this might be from Hesiod. I can't even remember anymore. But you have Uranus, the sky and the earth, but it's almost like they're static. Unless you have Eros driving them to each other or creating some kind of movement between them. And it's functioning the same way here. Where desire for God is what actually spurs movement in the angelic mind for anything to actually happen.

22:06 Wes: Yeah, he calls that desire, innate desire. Right. And it's different from what desire will become. It's that initial desire, that which Ficino also calls the birth of love. This turning towards beauty and then it's set ablaze. So he also calls this increment of love. So love gets transformed, the angelic mind turns towards God, its love is transformed in a way, and then it in turning towards God, drawing close to God, that's where the forms come in. And you know, you get the prototypes of all beings in the world. And then the way the story is completed is that the world soul similarly turns towards the angelic mind with love and receives those forms.

And then matter, which is initially a formless chaos, is then attracted to the world soul by its own innate love and then receives the forms from the. From the world soul. So we get a succession of these moments of love connecting these different orders or layers of reality.

23:08 Mark: Or the three chaos get ordered by this process.

23:12 Peter: When people hear this, they might think, oh, this sounds sort of like mystical mumbo jumbo, but in a way it's very much in contrast to mysticism. So you think about real mystics, what they say is that there's this possibility of complete unification with God or with Reality, Right. Sort of obliteration of the mystical subject in the object of mystical vision. Right. So you just sort of become one with the light that you're looking to or something. Whereas what Ficino is saying is, well, there's this, as you said, this innate desire to turn back towards God on the part of the angelic mind. And it doesn't actually just fall back into God because of course, then nothing would be produced.

23:55 Wes: Right.

23:56 Peter: You just have this kind of motion out of God that then comes back to God, fully realizes its identity with God and still be stuck with just God. Right. So instead what it does is it just. This is, by the way, very much based on Plotinus. It tries to grasp God and it does the best it can, which is that it winds up grasping all of the Platonic forms. But the Platonic forms are just the essences of things. So it's even going to be things like the nature of a mineral would be one of the things, I think that was mentioned in the text that you just read out. So the angelic mind grasp the nature of the minerals. And so that would mean that the angelic mind winds up knowing about geology as a result of this process.

24:33 Mark: Sure. It knows everything else. It is omnipotent because knowledge, you know, how can God know anything? God doesn't have parts. Knowledge involves having parts. Well, the angelic mind is actually the thing that has the mind like qualities. And God is somehow beyond all that. It is. Maybe you can only use negative theology too, which there was one point in there. So love ends up being the primary motion. It ends up being gravity, sort of. So, you know, we get from the Timaeus, from Plato's Timaeus, this idea of these spheres, right? So the world soul, the world body, the angelic mind, there are spheres revolving around.

God is the stationary center, right? Rest is better than motion, but motion is still good. Ultimately, it is like these things are orbiting around God because they're all like something that is eternally falling in an orbit, trying to get back to the center. It's just that they. Centrifugal force, whatever, they're not able to get fully back there. So they just keep revolving. But they're driven by love, by the love of God. At the same time, he says, at some point, how did this get going in the first place? Why did God create the universe? God didn't do so out of necessity, right?

God is above such things. God did so out of a free act of love. Whereas everywhere else, love is an incompleteness. It is a desire to get back to God. It's a desire to become complete again. So I think God would be above love as well.

25:55 Peter: Yeah, I think that's actually the place where we really see the Christianity coming in, because everything we've been talking about for the last 10 minutes or something, a pagan Neoplatonist could be nodding along, being like, yep, yep, that's right. But when he says that God loves what comes after him, that's obviously a Christian theme, right? So the love of God for creation and the idea of downward love is something that was brought into Platonism by other Christian thinkers before Ficino, but he's really putting that front and center. So the idea that there's a love of the perfect for the imperfect as well as a love of the imperfect for the perfect.

So remember when we were saying before that there are these two motions, procession and reversion. So things come out of God and go back to God, or they come out of mind and go back to mind. And he's saying that both of those motions are actually animated by love or caused by love. And I actually think philosophically, and this, by the way, to me, is philosophically the most interesting thing about dialogue and in fact, about Renaissance theories of love in general. Because I think this is a philosophical problem that we could kind of get our teeth into and think about it as still useful for us.

Now, if you love something, does that mean that you lack it? Because this is an idea you find in Plato, right? So there's this disagreement in the dialogue, which Ficino tries to sort of gloss over, where one of the characters, Agathon, says that love is like this gorgeous, hot young man, right? Because he's got it all. He's got beauty, and love is connected with beauty. And then Socrates comes along and describes love as being very much like himself, like this barefoot, older, ugly person who lacks his object of desire. And that idea that to love something is to kind of yearn for it.

And if you're yearning for something, that means you don't have it, right? That's very, I think, intuitive. But on the other hand, that kind of makes it sound like you're only love. So if we're thinking about it in terms of interpersonal relationships, then the perfect example of love would be the unrequited lover who has this love object, who they see walking through the streets every day, but they don't have the courage to go talk to them. It's like Dante and Beatrice, that kind of idea of the perfect lover. Whereas if you think that you could Love something that you've somehow attained, then perfect love might be something like an old married couple who have been together for 50 years and know each other completely and have almost become one person, right?

And I think that's actually a really interesting philosophical question, is whether love involves lack or privation or need or something like that.

28:34 Wes: You know, gets at the conflict between the Aristophane view of love, right, as reuniting, you know, basically joining with your other half with your lost other half. So in a way, it's kind of a merger back to a complete unity version of love, which Socrates, of course, objects. I think the more nuanced view of love is that it is relational, right? So it involves establishing some relationship to the other without completely collapsing back into the other. So, you know, we were talking about this idea of reversion. So the way he describes it on page 133 is that the Creator first creates everything, then he attracts, and third, he finishes everything also when it is born, flows from that eternal source, then it flows back to the same source when it seeks its own origin, and finally it is finished when it has returned to its own source.

This is one of the moments which reminded me of Hegel, Something being reflected back into itself, the in and for itself is what Hegel would call this, that moment of return. And the moment of return, of course, again, isn't just a collapse between the two poles. It's the establishment of a kind of relation, which is why Socrates wants to talk about the in betweenness, right? Betweenness and mediation, and the way in which love is the son of poverty and plenty. We had a relation here to Meno's problem, right? Which is that love is a lack, but it can't be completely a lack, even in the beginning, because if it were completely a lack, you wouldn't know what to seek.

So even to yearn for something is already to be connected to it and have it in some sense. And then the question is, what happens after you establish an even closer relationship, right? If you get what you want, if you get the loved one. And the answer is that you don't ever fully get what you want, right? You know, if you get the body, the body is not enough. You don't ever fully get what you want, because what you really want is the divine. The beautiful thing that's manifesting itself in the beloved is the divine. And that's what you're seeking, and that's what you never fully get.

There's always a lack.

30:47 Peter: I'm sorry, can I just say quickly Something about sex, which is obviously kind of a subtext to a lot of this. This phrase, platonic love, which is love that doesn't involve sex. And Ficino kind of invented that. And there was a reason he did, which is that in the Renaissance there were some people who were attacking Plato for basically being a sort of nasty pervert, because there were all these themes about homosexuality and dialogues, and they were obviously totally not on board with that. And Ficino comes along and writes this dialogue, part of the point of which is to say, no, no, no, you're completely misunderstanding what's going on here.

Because the paradigm of Platonic love has nothing to do with, like, touching a body. In fact, he says that the sense of touch has nothing to do with beauty or love. That that's just the sort of crude thing that we want to forget about. So the kind of lowest thing that he's able to accept as actually an expression of love or an erotic attitude would be looking at something beautiful or hearing something beautiful. So you only have erotic relationships for him at the level of visual sight, visual hearing, and then thinking, right. Touch, smell, taste, that's not involved.

So what that shows is that for him, the paradigm erotic encounter with something is to behold it, which obviously means sort of regarding it from a distance. Whereas again, we could contrast that to what has been done by earlier and later thinkers who belong to the mystical tradition, where they really think about the encounter with God as being based on sex. So you have these, like, highly erotically charged works in the medieval period, sometimes written by women, but not always where they kind of imagine themselves being ravished by Christ or having some kind of quasi sexual encounter with God.

The point being to use sex as a metaphor for complete unity, as in a sexual relationship, you have these moments of intense unity and then the unity is lost, and so the mystic kind of falls back away from God and then recovers unity. Whereas Ficino is desexualizing this whole theme of an erotic longing for God. There's no sex here. There's just a kind of stable admiration and yearning for God or for higher reality in general, which is always partially fulfilled, but not completely fulfilled. That's his idea of what Platonic love is. And that's why he's able to excuse Plato of the charge of being sort of interested in sex, and in particular interested in sex between an older man and a younger boy.

33:28 Seth: You remind me, Peter, that I wrote a paper in College on St. John of the Cross, a very example of that.

33:39 Peter: Was it a PG13 rated paper?

33:42 Seth: Yeah, this is interesting. One of the sections that really stood out to me so much that I wanted. I told my wife about it. I thought it was really interesting. I don't know if it's appropriate to talk about here, but the notion of how when one gets an object of desire, an object of love, one is destroyed and can only be recovered through requital. Much in the same way that the angelic mind is illuminated by God's brilliance. It's this idea that when we love, he says we die. But you can think almost like you become inert or incapable in some way or not whole.

It's like you lose your identity. And you only are recovered your identity when there's requital. And then the irony there is that you only have your existence through the other person. Which is again, structurally and probably metaphorically the same thing as you only have your existence through God. Only through love of God can you be a truly whole person. Or I should say a full soul maybe, or a complete soul. Just in the same way that your love for your object of desire is what makes you a full or complete person in body and in soul.

34:50 Wes: Yeah, this is chapter eight. This is one of the chapters I thought was really important as well. 140. I think it is. I think some of this is worth it reading again. This is another. I'm not going to keep harping on this Hegel thing.

35:04 Seth: Harp away.

35:04 Wes: I'll leave you to conclude what you want to conclude about the similarities.

35:08 Seth: But 140 would be the second speech on simple and mutual love.

35:13 Wes: Yeah. Basically there's a section where love is voluntary death. And so far it's death, it's bitter, and so far as it's voluntary, it's sweet. He who loves dies. For his consciousness, oblivious of himself, is devoted exclusively to the loved one. He's not conscious of himself. And that consciousness is a key function of the soul. If that function goes away, then you know, the soul of the lover does not exist. But it, at least in the case of reciprocal love, requited love, it comes to exist in the other person. So what he says is when the loved one loves in return, the lover leads his life in him.

Here surely is a remarkable circumstance that whenever two people are brought together in mutual affection, one lives in the other and the other in him. In this way they mutually exchange identities. Each gives himself to the other in such a way that each receives the other in return. How they can give themselves up while oblivious of themselves, I can see. But how one receives the other I do not understand. For A man who does not even have possession of himself will that much less take possession of someone else. The truth must rather be that each has himself and has the other two.

Page 145. A has himself. Little excursus into analytic philosophy here. A has himself but in B, and B also has himself but in A. When you love me, you contemplate me. And as I love you, I find myself in your contemplation of me. I recover myself lost in the first place by my own neglect of myself in you who preserve me. And then later on I keep a grasp on myself only through you, as a mediary.

36:54 Mark: So it does sound very nice when it's reciprocal. But then certainly there is a most just vengeance in reciprocal love. For a homicide must be punished by death. Who will deny that a man who is loved is a homicide, since he robs the loving one of his soul? So likewise, who will deny that the man himself dies when he loves in return the person who loves him? This is a restitution which is certainly due when each returns to the other the soul he has taken. Each gives up his own soul, his own to his lover, but by loving in return restores the other through his own.

Therefore, anyone who is loved ought in very justice to love in return. And he who does not love his lover must bear the charge of homicide, nay, rather the triple charge of thief, homicide and desecrator, which I told this out loud to my sister who I was vacationing with, and it just sounded like the most slimy, predatory. I really admire you, therefore you owe it to me to love me back. And then in a later chapter of

37:49 Wes: this book, I knew you were going to call this out.

37:51 Mark: He says love is mixed with hate because when you love, then you resent that they have you in servitude. And that sucks. And so like there's just always something. This is ultimately why divine love is the only good kind. That even though this sounds like you can have a mutual reciprocal human on human Hegelian self, mutually reinforcing kind of thing, ultimately even that I think doesn't work out so well.

38:18 Wes: Yeah, this is master slave stuff. Right. And then the question is whether there's genuine reciprocity.

38:23 Peter: I mean, he does capture it quite well.

38:24 Mark: Right.

38:25 Peter: So he's giving a psychological explanation of why people get so bent out of shape when they love someone and it's not requited. And I'm not sure he. He's really saying that you like have the right to expect that it be requited. He's just saying that is it's like very dramatically put. So when you love someone, you're giving them your soul. So like your soul has been handed over to them and losing your soul is death. That's the idea.

38:50 Wes: Right.

38:50 Peter: And so it's not necessarily anybody's fault, but if it's not requited, then the person has effectively killed you. Right, because you've given them your soul and they haven't given you a soul back, so to speak. One thing that's. Sorry, this is a little bit of a nerdy history of philosophy point, but something that's worth noticing about all this, you might think, well, how did he get any of this out of the Symposium? And maybe there's material in the Symposium that would help him. But what he's really doing is he's thinking of other Platonic dialogues as he's commenting on the Symposium.

So he's thinking here of the Phaedrus especially, which is another of the so called erotic dialogues. Maybe he's also thinking of the Alcibiades, which has this stuff about the lover seeing himself reflected in the eye of the beloved and so on. And that's also very typical of Neoplatonic commentary practice, that they will use the whole Platonic corpus to understand any one passage anywhere in Plato. So they assume there's this sort of body of doctrine kind of hidden behind the Platonic dialogues. Just as Ficino is trying to sort of iron out the apparent contradictions within the Symposium itself, he's also trying to reconcile the Symposium with everything else Plato ever wrote, and in particular the other things that are about similar topics.

So in particular other dialogues that get into love and erotic relationships. So that's all very classically Neoplatonic commentary practice. And of course he's learned it by reading Proclus and other Platonists who comment on Plato to say a little more

40:30 Mark: about this Christian psychology stuff. This like Pascal, you know, what was really interesting about Pascal, even though most readers, at least we in reading him, were not on board for his particular theology. But man, what a good psychological analysis. Or Augustine, you know, really good analyses of this is how desire seems to work. And yes, you can look through the weird lens of sin and things like that, but it's still some good data. Ficino talks about Lucretius as a case study that we had brought up in our Lucretius episode. Lucretius had some things to say building on this Aristophanes view of merging and how it doesn't work. And the two lovers, they Just want to just be in each other and just merge. And it just.

41:12 Wes: God damn, Mark. Thanks for that graphic.

41:18 Mark: So Ficino is. He says, I don't even know if this is true of Lucretius. Maybe you can tell us, Peter, that Lucretius killed himself over melancholy about love.

41:26 Peter: Yeah, I mean, obviously it's a mythic story, right, About Lucretius. Yeah, yeah.

41:30 Mark: I thought we didn't actually know very much about Lucretius such that we. Yeah, but the fact that he includes, you know, this sort of analysis. So it's an interesting take on. I was saying that love is the motivator. So it is like teleology. It is the thing which pushes us out and brings us back to God. But there's sort of a problem of evil story going on here of how is it that people can be tortured to the point of suicide or melancholy or just madness by love. Well, so there's different. Love is basically the desire to reproduce in beauty, Right? That's the Platonic view. Well, that could mean like the forms wanting to. Or even God in its creation, wanting to create copies of the perfect forms. Right. It could be very. Something that is abstract and spiritual in terms of. I want to spread good ideas around, but also cognitive.

42:25 Wes: Right. He makes the point that you describe the functioning of the mind. You're just describing something reproductive. You know, the way it's a representation and memory and things like that has a very broad application. But I. I know you want to get to the bodily based stuff, right?

42:40 Mark: Well, so there's also a demon. It's actually a bad demon. It comes from a good place, the propagation. But even though propagation of the species is something that is very literally, yes, we want to create more of ourselves, which are modeled on the form of man, which goes back to God. So it's, you know, has a divine origin, but it is possible for us to then get wrapped up in that. So, you know, teleology, as Aristotle thinks about it, is the normal way something develops, Right. The acorn normally will develop into an oak tree unless something comes along and deprives it of shade, deprives it of.

Or deprives it of sun, deprives it of the nutrients that it needs. Whereas I think Ficino even says most of the time, most people are more sensual. They give themselves to lust, to physical reproduction is a very powerful drive. And so it's actually the exception that can actually fulfill our potential as man to go toward the spiritual. And I think that is sort of restricted to the priestly class, the intellectuals, the Rare philosophers. Maybe this sort of elitism is right there in Plato and even in Aristotle, since Aristotle clearly thought, even though, like, it's the nature of man, it is our telos to become thinking beings, most people don't become philosophers.

43:58 Peter: So you actually get a partial redemption of the actual physical sex there. When he first brings it up, he sort of dismisses it and says, well, this has nothing to do with erotic relationships because that's just like the sense of touch.

44:09 Wes: Right?

44:10 Peter: That's not what I'm talking about. Because again, he's trying to distance Plato from that. But then later on he admits, because it's in the symposium, actually in Diotima's speech, he admits that even the drive to reproduce is somehow some kind of distant echo of the yearning to grasp the forms, to sort of instantiate the form of humanity over and over. That would sort of be one version of understanding what's going on there. And so even though of course he never comes out and says, oh yeah, so like, wanting to have sex is really a good idea that, you know, he's not going to say that, but he would at least be able to kind of explain where it comes from, let's put it that way.

44:49 Mark: Yeah, it's a byproduct of a good thing that's just sort of normal to the problem of evil. Sort of arguments that all these theologians have to give. Well, let's wrap up part one here and we can talk about the role beauty plays. We can return to aesthetics in part two and there's just plenty, plenty more great points from here supporters. That'll be the next thing in your feed. Thanks.

Life Live is back and streaming for the first time. Our big episode 300 will be broadcast live from our YouTube channel on Friday, August 19th at 8pm Eastern Time. Watching it is absolutely free. For more information, please see partially examined life.compel-live.