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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode 298. We've been talking about Marsilio Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposium on love from 1475 with our special guest Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy podcast. Peter, what is there some major concepts that we have not yet hit in this that we want to start with from your perspective.

0:28 Peter: I mean, I think it would be worth mentioning something that I actually talk about in the book you kindly mentioned at the start of part one, which is that this is only one of a whole series of works on love that were written in the Renaissance. Probably the most famous ones by A Jewish author named Leone Ebreo, which is also a dialogue about love, but there's one by Pietro Bembo, there's one by Pico della Mirandola, who's a famous colleague of Ficino's, who was this young rich dude who sort of threw himself into Platonism and Kabbalah and so on, and he wrote a commentary on a poem that's about love.

And a really interesting case is Tullia d'Aragona, so a female philosopher who also wrote a dialogue where she's talking to a male friend who's a real person. And that's really a really nice dialogue because it adds another layer to all this Neoplatonic stuff we've been talking about by having the two characters flirt. And in particular, the guy keeps sort of pursuing Tullia. So she's put herself into the dialogue as the real person. So the author appears in it as a character is what I mean. And her friend is sort of like saying, roughly speaking, hey, we should really put all this theory into practice.

And she's like, oh, you. So she's playing hard to get. And there's a lot of humor that comes out of that. So that's a really nice example. But it's not just that they keep coming back to the theme, these humanists. It's also that they don't necessarily agree about the nature of love. For example, in Part one, we were talking about the fact that Ficino has this very dismissive attitude towards physical love. And Pico defines love differently from Ficino, because Ficino really defines love in terms of, like, a longing for genuine beauty, which I guess was something we're going to be talking about now in Part two.

But Pico says that it could count as love if you're only pursuing apparent beauty. So even if you think that bodies aren't genuinely worth pursuing, someone could still love them, right? So he thinks of lust as a kind of misguided expression of love, but it's still an expression of love. And so he integrates sexual passion into his account of love in a way that Ficino didn't. That's an example of the fact that even though these authors are coming at this topic from a very similar direction, so they've all read Plato, they're all, in some sense, commenting on the symposium and the other erotic dialogues and so on, and they're reading each other as well.

So Pico knows he's disagreeing with Ficino here. They still adopt different stances on kind of smaller issues within the whole topic.

3:14 Wes: Chapter eight is a good source for that topic of the first speech. Not that we need to spend a lot of time on that. But he. He will talk about the two, what he calls the two kinds of love and the double nature of Venus, where one type of love is stimulated to know the beauty of God, the second, to recreate that same beauty in bodies. So the two powers of the soul, comprehension and generation. And when we see the beauty of a human body, we worship it as an image of divine beauty. And then there's the urge to, you know, replicate it. And in each case, that's love, whether it's the contemplative type or the propagating type.

These are both legitimate forms of love. But the problem is, if you're too eager for the latter at the expense of the former, right? So you start to prefer the beauty of the body to that of the soul. So it sounds like there's room here for those physical urges. It's just a matter of balance. At least that's the way it sounds in the Phaedrus speech in this particular chapter.

4:13 Peter: That thing about the two Aphrodites, by the way, is a nice example of sort of like how the humanist context of it. So that the issue is that there are two ancient stories about how Aphrodite was born. So there's the one where she comes out of the sea and another one where she's just fathered by one of the gods, right? So there was already in antiquity the idea that there were somehow. This goddess of Aphrodite is double. You already get this in Plotinus, actually. And so Ficino is aware of this. And so he's also. You might think that, like, the reader who knows their ancient literature would be flattered by the fact that they are kind of giving credit for knowing about this ancient issue about there being two Aphrodites.

And so Ficino's like, oh, of course there are two Aphrodites, and here's what they symbolize. Right? So it's, again, this sort of use of. Mark was talking about this before that. The use of what looks like really explicitly pagan material than being treated in an allegorical way to fit into the philosophical concepts he's got.

5:14 Mark: I'm not sure where in the text this is exactly, but it seems like, Peter, you'd refer to, you know, why is lust not love? So he has a proof for that.

5:22 Wes: Chapter nine, what Lovers Seek. All right. I think there might be another place as well.

5:28 Peter: Yeah. I think he makes this point a few times. It's Important to him to like desexualize love.

5:34 Mark: So this part is supposed to be in the description of the second speech by Pausanias the sophist. The more medical stuff is in the following speech by Eryximachus.

5:45 Peter: So this is a nice example of how he matches up the Renaissance characters in his own dialogue to the characters in the Platonic dialogue. So if I'm remembering this right, Ficino is actually the speaker of this speech responding to Eryximachus. The reason being that Eryximachus is a doctor and Ficino is a doctor, whereas Cristoforo Landino is brought in as a kind of expert in poetry. And so I think he's the one who comments on Aristophanes. Landino was like a professor of literature, basically. I think we read the dialogue and we think, oh, this is like a very sort of smooth presentation where every speech is kind of making the same point. But I think Ficino thought of himself as taking very different approaches to the topic in the different speeches. It's just that it sort of looks the same to us because it all looks like Renaissance Platonism.

6:30 Mark: I still see, even if you say like, well, these are all true and they're all Plato's view, but they're not samey samey, they're different aspects. Just like you can have different gods that are different pagan gods, different angels that are passing down different parts of God's wisdom, you could have these different figures that the most perfect way to express what love is is not to go straight to Socrates, but to give all these different aspects. You get a really well rounded view. Chapter nine under the second speech. Is this proof you know, why is lust not part of love? Because love is defined as seeking after beauty. So what is beauty? Well, beauty is order. Right, order. It's harmony between parts, it's symmetry, it's all those sort of classical stuff.

7:13 Wes: So it's formal rather than material.

7:15 Mark: Yes. And you have to have senses that have a certain amount of sophistication and they're objects to have a certain complexity to have harmony that you can't have harmony in a texture. You can have harmony in notes, you can have harmony in colors, you can have harmony in the features of somebody's face, you can have harmony in visual things, you can have it in auditory things, but you cannot have it in smells and tastes and touches. Therefore there can be no love that involves those lower.

7:45 Peter: I mean, think about like a really well balanced coffee. Not to be too coffee snob.

7:51 Wes: It's funny, this actually came up in our aesthetics Episode. I reject the beauty of foodstuffs personally, but go ahead.

8:00 Seth: It's an interesting question. Can you call a smell beautiful or a taste beautiful? Taste is probably a more problematic case.

8:06 Peter: I think there's.

8:07 Seth: But it can be pleasing. You can describe it in certain ways. But would you use the term beautiful? Mark, I think you're right in your characterization of what Ficino's saying. But there's also the other element that experience requires apprehension. It requires reason, essentially. Right. Because he goes on, he talks about there's six forms of sensation, right? There's mind, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. And, you know, he ultimately wants to say that it's only through mind that you can understand harmony. So it's really. Beauty is not something in an object. It's not just that you can't get it through these lower senses. It's also not something.

8:49 Wes: Well, it's mind, sight and hearing. Right.

8:52 Seth: Ultimately, I thought what he said, maybe I got this wrong, is it's not just that you can't get beauty through the lower senses. It's that you have to have mind. Even if you have sight and hearing as ways in which beauty can come through, you still require mind to have a grasp of harmony, balance, what have you. And that's why beauty becomes. It's an intellectual thing and not a physical thing. And that's how he's going to make the bridge to how, you know, apprehension of beauty can then, because the mind or the soul is how you can ultimately connect to God and the higher order things. That's how it's. That mechanism is going to work to make sure that you distinguish between something like base apprehension of beauty in an object versus understanding really what beauty is or how you can see it, so to speak.

9:42 Peter: So that means animals couldn't appreciate beauty because they don't have rational minds.

9:47 Seth: Yeah, I think so.

9:49 Mark: So this is jumping into the third speech a little bit, but I see on page 150 he does the thing that Plato does in the Republic of saying some kinds of melodies are the soft and the serious and steady ones, those are heavenly. But the soft and sensuous ones, those are related to the second Venus, to the earth, love. And so it could be that somehow the serious and steady melody is more intellectual, so maybe you could soothe the savage beast with a melody. But what they're really getting is just the sensuous character. They're not actually seeing the complexities and appreciating the form. Yeah. So they're not really getting a handle on beauty, even though there are Certain sensuous characteristics. I like, Wes, that you had pointed out again, that matter form distinction.

10:36 Wes: Right.

10:37 Mark: You can have soft, beautiful voices just speaking in a calming tone that might also suit the savage beast in the same way. Something about the matter of the thing as opposed to the formal complexity.

10:48 Seth: No, that's a good point, Mark, that. It's not about matter. Right. It's about arrangement in some way.

10:53 Peter: The reason he lets in sight and hearing is that he wants to give us something that could be the first rung on a ladder that takes us all the way back up to God. Right. So this is something that comes out in the symposium itself in Diotima's speech where she actually says, you can start with your appreciation for beautiful bodies and use that as your kind of way into the whole erotic process that ultimately culminates in grasping beauty itself. If there were no kind of sensation that allowed you to experience love, then I think it would be kind of mysterious how we would ever get from everyday life to these sort of philosophical heights. And his answer is that sense that sight and hearing will allow you to do that.

11:40 Wes: Yeah. So it's in chapter two of Agathon's speech that he'll say that love only pertains to knowledge, shapes and sounds, or involves reason, sight and hearing. And then he'll go on in chapter three to give an argument about why beauty, its matter is not per se beautiful, but beauty has to be something incorporeal. So. And then he'll argue that the image is not material. So he will argue that what's going on in sight and sound is also not a matter of, you know, physical, the physical and the material. So they have some, you know, speaking of the latter, there's some crossover there with the mind involving something incorporeal that

12:24 Peter: actually takes us back to the original metaphysical hierarchy. So I mentioned this all the way at the beginning of part one. So there's five levels, right? There's God, mind, soul, and then quality and then matter. So what you're talking about there with sounds and images, visual images, those are qualities, and they're not material, they're things that are in matter. By the way, there's a much bigger theme here about mediation. I don't know if we want to get into that.

12:52 Mark: Let's do some more epistemology. Yeah, because we've got sort of the metaphysical structure, and then you can sort of see that, you know, in terms of Platonic epistemology, the lower levels are reflections of the higher levels. So that, you know, what is good in Matter is insofar as it has pale reflections like the shadows on the wall of the cave of the forms, but that he is the sandwich of layers. So it's not just straight to God, it's not straight to the form of the good, it's through all these intervening angelic mind, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yes, go from there. I wasn't clear how that chain that we said at the beginning of with the world spirit, and that's exactly related to the soul quality matter, the five rung one that you were saying. So, yeah, let's lay out whatever we can of the epistemology here.

13:37 Peter: I guess the basic starting point here would be the standard Platonic picture that you just mentioned. So we have paradigms and images, right? So let's say the form of justice and then a just action or a just city or a just person that participates in the form, right? And so the city or action or person is an image of the paradigm. And that's the usual way people think about Platonism. And Ficino is not quite thinking about it like that. I mean, he certainly would agree with that. But he has a more complicated idea which really comes from Neoplatonism and in fact even from specifically later Neoplatonism.

So I would associate this especially with a philosopher named Iamblichus, who is after Plotinus. The basic idea is really based on mathematics. So the thought here is that between two extreme terms, you can have a mean term like 2, 4, 6, or maybe 2, 4, 8 would be a better example. So the relationship between 2 and 4 is the same as the relationship between 4 and 8, namely doubling. So if you want to get to 8 by doubling, you have to go through 4. And Iamblichus takes that idea and makes it central to his epistemology and metaphysics. So he says that between any two extremes, so things that don't have anything in common, what you need to do is posit something in the middle that has something in common with both.

Like four is the double of two, but it's the half of eight. So that's what Ficino is doing in his general system. For example, he says that the angelic mind is unmoving and immaterial qualities are in matter, so they're material and they're moving and changing all the time. So in between there has to be something that has one of those properties and lacks the other. One soul is immaterial, but moving. This is changing its thoughts and ideas all the time, unlike the mind. I don't know if that's a great

15:39 Mark: example, but he really abuses the term half throughout here. The thing we were talking about that if you love, that means you lack. So you're not perfection, you're not beauty, you're not the object of love, but neither are you completely clueless and don't even know where to start seeking. So the same thing with Socrates, knowing that he knows nothing, therefore he is halfway between wisdom and ignorance. No, that's not the way half works. But if you say that, well, being halfway is you have something in common with the fullness and then something in common with the emptiness. Therefore let's call it half.

16:15 Peter: That's right, yeah. So it's maybe a better word would be something like compromise. Right, so bodies and nous, or body nous means mind in Greek. In Greek, sorry. So we have bodies on the one hand and we have mind on the other hand, and they're really dissimilar to each other. So what we want is something in between that has something in common with bodies and something in common with mind, and that's soul. This is relevant to the theme of this commentary, because love is sort of like the ultimate example of one of these mediating principles, right?

Because as we were talking about in part one, to love is to lack something but kind of have it, right? So it's to be like on the way towards grasping something. Here he picks up a theme that's again, in the Symposium itself, where Socrates says that love is not a full God, but rather a demon. And Ficino, I guess most of you got to this part in the text, right? Because towards the end, right, this thing about whether love is a demon and why love is a demon.

17:18 Mark: Well, and. And let's just insert. Listeners should be hearing D A E M O N. In other words, the ancient Greek, which often we just say daimon or something like as a way of just saying. But yeah, demon is fine. That is actually the way I think the word is supposed to be pronounced.

17:32 Wes: But yes, so this is the sixth speech and it's. I think chapter six is where he ranks the demons. And then it's chapter seven where he talks about that partial possession idea. You know, we lack what we desire, but we must have it in some way beforehand.

17:50 Peter: Yeah, exactly. Here he's picking up on an idea that was present in antiquity, which is that these demons, or daimones in Greek are intermediaries between the earthly realm and the divine realm. Angels, by the way, are often thought of in the same way. The word angel means messenger, right? So they're emissaries sent by God towards us. Daimones are the other way around. They're like bringing us up towards the divine. You could even think about something like a guardian spirit, like Socrates's divine sign or guardian spirit as an example. So that's helping Socrates come closer to divinity, like to the perfect mind, through helping him gain knowledge and so on. So what Ficino wants to say about love, therefore, is that it has this kind of daimonic aspect, which is that its job is to lead us up through this hierarchy. And this is all based on this idea of mediation.

18:50 Wes: Yeah, the mediation is between beauty and lack of beauty, he'll say in chapter five. Actually, I think it is chapter five of this speech. So he's describing three demons. I think there are five, but well, no, maybe there are seven. Anyway, he's talking about intelligence and generation, you know, these also mediate between beauty and lack of beauty. But then the third that he talks about in that particular chapter is love.

19:17 Peter: Yes, there's anything that will pull you up from the lower to the higher. I mean, ultimately the extremes of the whole system are matter at the lower end and God at the higher end. And God is pure beauty, like beyond even the beauty of the forms or the intelligible world. And matter is pure absence, or pure nothingness, or pure lack of beauty.

19:39 Wes: Right.

19:39 Peter: It lacks all the determination and harmony that Ficino wants to associate with beauty. And so whenever you're experiencing love, that's genuine love and not just lust or something, that means that you're always like, moving away from matter and towards God for him. So that's how he gets the Christian theme in there that we talked about all the way at the start.

19:58 Mark: Yeah, I pulled out, I'd even sent to the guys via Slack this morning, something from. So chapter 17, of course, since Socrates speech is the longest in the Symposium, the chapter here is the longest in here. It has, you know, many chapters within this account of the sixth speech here, but I pulled out, on page 211, you see the beauty of the body. Do you wish to also see the beauty of the soul? Subtract the weight of the matter itself from the bodily form in the limits of space, Leave the rest. Now you have the beauty of the soul. Do you wish to see the beauty of the angelic mind take away now, please, not only the special limit of place, but also the sequence of time.

Keep the multiple composition. You will find there the beauty of the angelic mind. Do you wish to see the beauty of God take away, in addition to those above the Multiple composition of forms. Leave the simple form and there you will have found the beauty of God. Well, what shall I have? After subtracting those qualities, do you think beauty is anything else but light? So going back to the allegory of the cave from the Republic, that God is just ultimately the light. You can't see the light. Like you'd have to die, like. So mysticism, you know, it tries, but it's not.

You can't become one with the light. I just thought this was interesting because it seems like from our perspective, removing these things like beauty requires form. We said that earlier. So wait. Remove form, remove spatiality, remove time. It just becomes more unrestricted. Beauty becomes more beautiful. That in fact, these boxes in which even ideas and seeds and the world spirit and these, These ever increasingly material things fit our ways of. Yes, they make the beauty something that we can get our minds around. They can attract us, they can provide us a way onto that ladder.

But, you know, we want to get up the ladder. So it's just really. We recognize that even in a beautiful body or in the beauty of a mathematical equation, you know, the form of that, the thing we're really appreciating is the light from God. Something that has no form whatsoever.

22:02 Seth: I don't think that's right.

22:04 Wes: I mean, no form whatsoever.

22:05 Seth: Yeah.

22:05 Wes: You know, in a way, it's like the medium of apprehension of anything. So it is the most formally general thing. The way to think of light is just. I mean, in a way we can treat any lower level formal quality as a medium in the sense of a. The thing that is grasped when we know things, when we grasp things, they're. They're formal, they're structural, they're incorporeal. And at this level, it's just the fact of appearing at all, which I don't know whether you would call that formal. So I think that's what. That's what we're getting at with light.

22:41 Seth: I'm not sure I understand what I thought the process was. We talked in part one about how the angelic mind is essentially the realm of forms or the, you know, the realm of ideas. Isn't the process that you have the material, the apprehension of the material beauty or the apprehension of the material idea, dog, tree, whatever, then you are able through mind to apprehend the Platonic form, if you will, or the forms. And it's in that realm of the angelic mind that you actually is illuminated by the light of God. So it's not as though you're completely removing form. When you're moving up the chain, it's just that when you get to the point that you're not apprehending the physical beauty, but instead you're apprehending the formal beauty, if you will. You somehow are in the angelic mind, which is illuminated by the light of God.

23:37 Wes: I think Mark is right that we've gone beyond the Platonic forms at this point. We've reached a higher level.

23:45 Mark: Yeah. Peter, do you have any thoughts of this, sort of from the evolution from the Timaeus to Plotinus through Neoplatonists, how this theory of recollection and, you know, the epistemological picture gets changed so that it has this implication for beauty that I was just outlining that, you know, beauty is the thing that only God ultimately has. Is the only reason we're attracted to anything is because it has some reflection of a reflection of a reflection of God in it. And God is the light that allows us to get in touch with these reflections. And so we are, through the demons, whatever the mechanism, is, able to climb the ladder. What am I missing here?

24:25 Wes: That's a perfectly clear explanation.

24:28 Peter: Absolutely. Yeah. It's hard to say how I could add anything to that. No, I think you guys are putting your fingers on a really problematic tension in Ficino's system. Because on the one hand, he wants to be Plotinus, and Plotinus associates form with mind and also associates beauty with mind. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to say that God is beyond beauty because he wants to make God the kind of anchor of the whole erotic process. Right. So he wants you to go all the way back to the one. And I guess you could find that in Plotinus as well. The same tension might be present in Plotinus. I think the way that Ficino is going to do it is influenced by someone we haven't mentioned yet, who's Thomas Aquinas. So I forget if you guys have done something on Thomas Aquinas conception of God.

25:17 Mark: Not directly, no. You should recommend the thing we should cover.

25:21 Peter: Yeah. I mean, of course, the famous thing would be the five ways, right? His five proofs for the existence of God.

25:25 Mark: We've done that much. We've done.

25:28 Peter: And so even there, you get the idea that God is like pure actuality or something like that, or pure form, which would maybe be the most relevant way of putting it here, Pure being. So one of the five ways says that God is the source of all perfection because he's the ultimate perfection. And for Aquinas, that would be very close to saying that God is pure form or pure being. And Ficino would agree with that. So what he would say, I think the way he would resolve the tension that you're circling around here is to say, well, start with a beautiful body.

So what you're admiring there is the harmonic form. And then that form is anchored in the mind, the universal mind or angelic mind. Because that's where the Platonic form of beautiful bodies is. That's even more beautiful. And then if you go all the way up to God, what you're getting rid of is the multiplicity of forms. I think that was even clearer in the passage you just read out, Mark that what you leave aside when you go from mind to God is the many forms. But you don't leave aside form as such, because what you're going to get to is pure form.

That's God, pure form, pure actuality, the ultimate immaterial reality. And that's again, remember that every level is going to be, as we said, a compromise or halfway between the lower level and the higher level. So mind needs to have something in common with God. God's not completely unlike anything else that comes after him in Ficino. And the thing that they have in common is that they're both immaterial form. And that's going to be enough, he thinks, to satisfy the requirement of saying that God is pure beauty. So if God is pure form, God is pure beauty.

I think that's how he would do it. To me, I'm not sure how ultimately satisfying that is philosophically, because to me the thing that makes it plausible to talk about beauty in terms of form is that forms can be more or less well arranged or something like that, right? And once you eliminate all the multiplicity and all you've got is pure, simple form, it's not really that clear to me what licenses us to talk about beauty anymore.

27:37 Mark: So I thought there was even. Right, there's even a distinction. This is going way Back to page 136 or so. So this is under Pausanias speech. This is the second speech between ideas that are in mind, concepts which are in soul, seeds which are in nature and shapes with are in matter. So these are all different ways of talking about Platonic forms or the reflections of forms. But certainly we never distinguished before between forms and ideas. Capital I, capital F. In generally talking about Plato like those are just one and the same. But I think that's always been a source of some confusion.

Because if you say then concepts in the soul, well, that sure as heck Sounds like ideas or something different. Is there something about the history of this, you know, why you divide these into all these different things? I see why. Like seeds in nature. So it's sort of like the DNA that you've got. The form, the Aristotelian form of the thing that's somehow in the thing is different than the heavenly Platonic form of dog. So maybe there's the heavenly idea of dog and then there's the seed of dog that plays some mechanical roles.

28:46 Peter: The history of Platonism to some extent is a history of people trying to figure out what to do about these forms, partially because the first thing that happened is that Aristotle came along and said, oh, these Platonic forms are ridiculous. We don't need these. We have immanent forms in bodies, so we have these form matter composites. And what would we need with a whole other world full of forms? You're just duplicating the world and saying, oh, there's a perfect world up in heaven, which is the source of the imperfect world down here. But if the things down here already have forms, what licenses you to postulate this whole other heaven full of forms?

Right. You're just doubling everything, as he says. So later Platonists try to respond to that challenge. And one of the most popular ways to do that is to say that the forms are ideas in some kind of perfect mind. So either in the mind of God. That's something you already see, for example, in a Jewish philosopher of the 1st century BC named Philo of Alexandria, probably the first Jewish philosopher. And Plotinus has a solution similar to that, except that he doesn't put the forms as ideas in the highest God, the perfect one. He puts them in this universal mind, which is the second principle in his system.

So again, Ficino is kind of torn here because on the one hand, he wants to say that his highest principle is God and is a creating God.

30:10 Wes: Right.

30:10 Peter: So you would think that he would have, like, knowledge, for example. But then he wants to say that the ideas or the forms are in this universal mind, which is the second principle, the first thing that God creates. So again, he's sort of torn in two different directions by his Christianity and his pagan Platonism. I don't know if that answers the question, but sort of the historical background of what he's doing. Sure.

30:33 Mark: You know, it's hard not to read Ficino as in the light of somebody like Kant or Hume, you know, talking about these majestic pyramids that the. The ancient metaphysicians would put together. And as students of Modern philosophy, we might think of this, you know, Leibniz or people sort of. But no, this is what they're talking about of really building up. We're going to put the angels in there and we're going to put the actual planets in there, we're going to put astrology in there, we're going to put the pagan gods in there, we're going to just pack it all full. And so not only is it, you know, we're making. Why do you need a copy of the forms that are already present in things? No, we have like four different layers of copies.

31:12 Peter: Yeah, plenty of room.

31:13 Mark: Yeah, there's no problem. And those are supposed to all serve a mechanical purpose. Making this connection to Kant that when reading Aristotle's categories and then Kant's categories, we think about, you know, the general properties that everything has or that the experience world has versus what the world in itself has. And a point of interpretation of Kant of. Can you say, like Schopenhauer does that, well, if the things of the experienced world have number, for instance, does that mean that the world in itself positively does not have number?

I think a strict interpretation of Kant is we just don't know. Like we just don't know the world in itself. But as these sort of Kantian creative metaphysicians like Schopenhauer would say. So this is all descended from. I can see, you know, where Schopenhauer probably read various religious things. So that God for sure doesn't have any of these categories, right? He's not limited by these categories. He is absolutely singular. And by saying singular, I don't mean that he has the category of number. He is beyond the category of number is only the angelic mind that has multiple ideas in it where the idea of number gets distinguished.

So in the same part of the text that I read from about these different layers of beauty, it's because these different metaphysical layers have these different qualities that it's not just a matter of the experience world has all of them, God has none of them. It's that they fall off. And we got a little of this in Kant that like. Well, you've got outer sense. That includes the world of outer sense, which includes spatial relations. But the world of inner sense doesn't include space, it only includes time. So it sort of is shaving off one by one.

Well, we get. So that maybe that's the idea of concepts, right, in your five layer system.

32:55 Peter: Yeah, those are the concepts in the soul which are like the unfolding of the.

32:59 Mark: Or quality, you said.

33:01 Seth: Yeah.

33:01 Peter: So you actually start with forms and mind, and then you have the concepts in soul, which are the unfolding of these forms in kind of like someone thinking about it in time, right? Sort of thinking about one thing, something else. And then the world soul puts images of those into matter, and that's quality.

33:18 Mark: And by the time we get up to the angelic mind, even time has gone away. So the world still is eternal. It doesn't have time, it doesn't have space, but it still has number. And so the fact that you actually can take one quality out, sort of each layer you go up until you get to God, that has no qualities at all, or is beyond qualities.

33:36 Peter: The fact that these things sort of turn up at different levels has a maybe a kind of surprising advantage, which is exegetical. So, for example, we said a while back in this conversation that there's this apparent tension between two of the speeches where Agathon says that love is very beautiful and sort of got everything he might want. And then Socrates depicts love as very needy. So since Ficino needs to make both things come out true, he has to somehow figure out how could these both be true of the same thing, love? And his answer is, well, he's talking about love at two different levels.

So Agathon is talking about love at the level of mind, and Socrates is talking about love at the level of soul. So at the level of mind, mind is already grasping all of its ideas all the time. So it's very perfect and done. Whereas the soul is on this constant search to try to understand and move back towards intelligible reality. And so the more pathetic kind of needy version of love is something you can associate with love at the level of soul, whereas the more glorious, perfect version of love is love at the level of mind. And he does that throughout the commentary.

So anytime he's got a kind of exegetical problem where the characters in the dialogue seem to be disagreeing with each other, he says, oh, that's okay, because they're talking about two different things, like two different places in my system. And he just says that over and over. It's very clever, actually. I mean, if you think about, he sort of got this massive doctrine which he assumes from the get go, has to somehow be the point of everything Plato ever wrote. And then he's faced with this very heterogeneous, complicated text where it doesn't look like the characters are saying the same thing at all.

And then he manages to get them all to be like, as you said before, Mark sort of taking different perspectives on the same body of ideas is really quite an impressive performance.

35:44 Seth: Are we trending towards the end here, Mark, or is this. I want to get up close and personal with Peter for a minute before we close. So that's.

35:50 Wes: Go for it.

35:51 Mark: Let me give an example then, before

35:53 Peter: we go to our hearing and vision only, please, Seth.

35:59 Mark: So one of the things that we haven't specifically talked about is the Aristophanes mythology and how it is reinterpreted. So I referred already to what he says later in the. What Ficino says later in the text in talking about Lucretius. This is the context of one of the last two speeches where he is talking about our attempt to merge and how it doesn't work. And that is the criticism that people give and that really Socrates could give of Aristophanes. So Aristophanes, in describing this myth whereby all human beings used to have four legs and four arms and we were split by the thunderbolt of Zeus.

And so we're all trying to merge. We're trying to find our other half. You know, there's a phenomena of the actually trying to merge that he does. Ficino does address later in the dialogue. But in this part, in the discussion of Aristophanes speech, the fourth speech, he has to just give this allegorical interpretation of it which has. Just like we said, there were two Venuses before the heavenly and the earthly Venus. The earthly Venus is pulling you toward reproduction. The heavenly one is pulling you toward contemplation and reproduction of mental forms.

There's likewise. We are born with two lights. So again, this. The heavenly light thing.

37:10 Wes: But we have the fall and the natural light.

37:13 Mark: Yes, there's a heavenly light and the natural light, but there's something like the fall where we lose contact with the heavenly light. The natural light is still good because it can just lead us to seek the heavenly light. So that's again, going back to that ladder.

37:29 Wes: Yeah, we can have a good relationship or to it or a bad relationship to it. But yeah, Mark, I think this is an important point. I mean, this is a place again, where he's amending something in the dialogue. So, you know, this again, the idea of love as merger being reunited. The Aristophanian idea. Yeah, he's reinterpreting it as reunion, as getting back to the divine light. Like the other half that you've lost is the divine light. And to get your other half back, you get the divine light back. And he'll say, you know, around page 155, he'll say in chapter five, he'll say, the human soul tries to understand what is divine by examining what is related to itself.

And this includes activity in accordance with different virtues, prudence, courage, justice, temperance, and even different character types, people who are more focused on one virtue or another. But that's the way in which you recover your other half, so to speak, in your relationship to the divine.

38:31 Peter: This is also another place where he interferes in the text in such a way as to remove any suggestion of anything too salacious. Because Aristophanes in the speech says that there are different pairings based on what the original eight-limbed people were. So there are male-male ones, female female ones, and male female ones. So what he's trying to explain there is same sex and opposite sex sexual attraction. And Ficino just completely eliminates that implication and says that what Aristophanes is talking about is acquiring the divine light through virtue, that these three pairings symbolize three different virtues. So male male is courage, female, female is temperance, and male female is justice, if I'm remembering that right.

39:21 Wes: Yeah. Bisexuality, justice is bisexual.

39:23 Peter: Justice is bisexual because it's both male

39:26 Wes: and female, actually, and both passive and active, both giving.

39:29 Peter: I think he's thinking there of there's something in ancient Pythagoreanism where the number of justice is five because it's the first combination of an odd and an even number. And I guess even numbers are male and odd numbers are female. So two plus three is five. Right. So that idea that justice is like the harmonic inclusion of both the male and the female is something that he would have known was a Pythagorean theme. All this stuff sort of being put into the stew and stirred up by Ficino. So that's probably why he thinks that justice is the male female combination. But of course, it has nothing to do with sexuality at all.

40:12 Mark: Is that a savory approach for your questions at Peter?

40:16 Seth: Well, no. At the break, I had asked Peter how long he'd been doing his podcast, and it's 12 years. He started just maybe less than a year after we did. And what's your current topic, Peter?

40:28 Peter: At the moment I'm doing two things, actually. So I do in alternating weeks, I always do like this sort of European series in which I just passed 400 episodes actually last week.

40:39 Seth: Congrats.

40:40 Mark: And what year are you up to, I think was the question.

40:42 Peter: Yeah, and in that I'm doing the Reformation, so I'm in the middle of the French Reformation Renaissance, because I did the Italian Renaissance first. And Then I did the Reformation in Central Europe and now I'm doing basically 15th and 16th century France. And you might think, gosh, that doesn't sound like it would take you very long. Who's a 15th or 16th century French philosopher?

41:03 Mark: Right.

41:04 Peter: And probably the only one who leaps to mind is Montaigne. But actually, it turns out there's a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. So there's Rabelais, there's Marguerite of Navarre, there's Peter Ramus, who is the one I've been writing podcasts about most recently. So he was this philosopher who introduced this new kind of educational theory that then swept across Europe and changed the way everyone studied philosophy and so on. So I'm doing that and then in alternating weeks with that, I do series on different kinds of, I guess what you might call non Western or global philosophy. So I did Indian philosophy with someone named Jonardon Ganeri. And now for a long time I've been doing Africana philosophy with another co author who is Chike Jeffers. So in that we just did Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and now we're doing figures from the African independence movement, like Franz Fanon.

42:00 Seth: Well, this is the problem.

42:01 Mark: So those are not chronological, that other podcast.

42:05 Peter: I mean, the two series are chronological, but they have nothing to do with each other.

42:09 Seth: So this is the deal. I love what Peter does, but I'll be dead before he gets to Heidegger. And that's what.

42:16 Peter: That's the plan.

42:17 Mark: That's what I'm going.

42:18 Peter: The plan is that I'll be dead before I get to Heidegger. That's the whole idea. I would love to do Heidegger, actually, but it would be a challenge.

42:25 Seth: I'm excited for him to get to his project to the 20th century, just because I think it'll be really interesting to see. You know, I think we've done a better job of covering sort of what I'd call less canonical figures, maybe in the 19th, 20th century than we have in other eras, partially out of interest and partially out of scholarly capability. But now that I know that you've got the Africana series going with some of those, and those are all figures that we've talked about that I would very much like to listen to.

42:58 Peter: So good.

42:59 Seth: I don't have to wait 10 years to listen to another one of your podcasts.

43:03 Peter: Yeah, it's weird sometimes because in the Africana series we've talked a lot about Mark Marxism, but of course there's no coverage of Marx yet. So that's a little odd. Once Africana is done, I'm going to switch to another co author named Karyn Lai and we're going to cover classical Chinese philosophy together, which will be an interesting challenge, but my plan is to keep pressing on with the European stuff. I think when I get to the 17th century that's going to be really difficult because if you think about it, the good thing about ancient and medieval philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, is that it's mostly lost, so it makes it much easier to cover.

Whereas the slogan of my podcast is History of philosophy without any gaps. And it's not so clear what it would mean to do that for the 17th century, because you've literally got thousands of philosophers whose works are extant, never mind the 18th century and 19th century. So I'm going to have to find some way of bringing all that material

44:03 Mark: under control, the history of philosophy without any hacks. We're going to leave all the copiers and derivative stuff and just cover the original.

44:14 Peter: Actually, I was just listening to one of your old episodes recently on Malebranche, and at the beginning you say something like you're arguing about. The three of you are arguing about is he a top shelf philosopher? And I think one of you says something like, well, he's one of the best B listers. And maybe what I'll wind up doing is covering all the A listers and all the B listers and only the top C listers and leave it at that.

44:43 Mark: Yes, Malebranche, we just got to this last January, so in terms of older episodes, it took us a long time to get to, but there have been plenty of other Henri Bergson, we've done multiple episodes on so called B listers who are considered A listers at their time. But then all these people like Plotinus, who I've read, I think maybe on your podcast were saying was, if you're asking who is the most influential philosopher of all time, like who was most read, most affected, like Plotinus may be the guy, or certainly Aquinas. And these are people we haven't covered yet because just through the lens of now their fame has been eclipsed, paved over maybe a little bit with other things and Ficino making such a big splash at the time, I had never even heard of Ficino.

45:32 Peter: I think if you're just talking about influential philosophers in terms of longevity of influence, then Plotinus is certainly top five in the history of European philosophy. Weirdly Porphyry, his student writing, his influence is mostly through writing this very short work on logic which was read over and over and over and commented on a lot. I mean, Aristotle obviously is way above everyone else in the history of Western philosophy. So there's sort of like Aristotle's influence is sort of bigger than everyone else's influence put together, except maybe Plato.

So there's a big drop off after him. But it's also like, how do you compare the influence of someone like Kant to the influence of someone like Plotinus? So I mean, Kant literally happened too recently to have been influential for as long as Plotinus was, because Plotinus was influential for a good thousand years and Kant wasn't that long ago. So I guess the jury's still out on how influential Kant will wind up being.

46:36 Mark: Newbie modern philosophers like Kant.

46:39 Peter: Yeah, Hume and all these guys. Since my main area of research, or one of them is Islamic philosophy, I like to stress that one of the most influential figures in the history of European philosophy was actually a Muslim philosopher, namely Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, to give him his real name, because he was massively influential in later medieval and even early modern philosophy. And he was from Afghanistan. So it's amazing the way that the different kind of cultures and threads in history of philosophy cross. It's something that I've tried to really pursue in my podcast series.

47:14 Mark: Well, thanks so much, Peter, for joining us.

47:17 Wes: Thank you. This was great.

47:18 Seth: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

47:19 Peter: Thanks for having me on again. It's great to see you all again, not just hear you.

47:24 Mark: So I think we got a lot of the details here. We'll probably talk a little more this week at least. Wes and I, Seth, I know you're traveling to do a nightcap, maybe do some, pull out some more quotes, do something like that. The next episode we're going to do a Shakespeare play. So the next thing you're going to hear is us reading it with a star studded people that have been in various minor roles on TV cast. I don't want to even announce it in case somebody doesn't show up. Of Shakespeare's least popular play, Timon of Athens. So it's actually Alcibiades who is in this dialogue, the symposium whose name we did not utter once this entire discussion for some reason we just didn't get to the end really is in that play.

And there are many other points of context. There's cynic philosophy. So very excited to get into that. Do you guys have any closing thoughts? Seth in particular? Because for sure we won't talk to you more about this, about this kind of philosophy, about this reading.

48:20 Seth: I think I convinced myself during the course of the conversation that it was a lot more fun and interesting than I guess I thought it was while I was reading it. So chalk that up to philosophy needing to be done dialogically instead of wrapped up by yourself stuck with a text.

48:37 Mark: Well, and it's nice to get all the I didn't read a rule that said no name dropping at the beginning to Peter. And that's good because his specialty is name dropping and because how else would we know about the guy from 100 BC who came up with this specific idea whose name I'll have to go back and listen again to?

48:54 Seth: I am.

48:54 Mark: Because that was I think there you go. The several other names that it's nice to he gives context to these things. So it's nice. I like Wherever we're going to do a figure that is covered by his podcast, I will go and listen to his. You know, very compact. We got in a lot more detail, a lot more meat than he is able to do in his format, but they complement each other nicely. And I highly recommend folks should check out the new book Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy as well as your other thick tomes. Or just listen to them. But having the piece of tree in your hand is so satisfying.

49:30 Peter: Yeah, leave it on your coffee table to make yourself look smart.

49:34 Wes: The bodily beauty isn't Absolutely.

49:38 Peter: Okay. Thanks, guys.

49:38 Wes: All right, see you.

49:39 Seth: Thanks.

49:40 Peter: Good night, everybody.

49:41 Seth: Thank you.

49:42 Wes: Bye.

49:47 Mark: Partially Examine 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 examine life.compel-live.