Plato's Bedroom: Desire, Union, and Procreation

David O'Connor is a faculty member in both the department's of philosophy in the classics at the University of Notre Dame but it may be most interesting for us to know that he was also an undergraduate for at least two years at the University of Chicago where he played on their football team on the offensive line and I have it on assurance from professor O'Connor himself that the offensive line is the most philosophical of football positions but after he left that behind he became a professor of philosophy and his teaching and writing focuses on ancient philosophy aesthetics ethics and politics and philosophy of religion he's also known for his online lectures on love and sexuality which have reached a wide international audience and are the basis of his two recent books love his barefoot philosophy and Plato's bedroom ancient wisdom and modern love which is the subject of tonight's lecture and I can't also tell you on good authority that is the most edifying discussion of human sexuality on the Internet without a doubt he has also published extensively on the relation between philosophy art and literature in both the ancient and the modern world so with that as an introduction please help me and please tell me to welcome professor David O'Connor thank you it's always a pleasure be back at the University of Chicago I learned a lot here at I feel like in lots of ways my intellectual trajectory was established here through the core curriculum ever since then I have had a very great difficulty fitting into a merely disciplinary Department feel like my intellectual life has been about as undisciplined as it could possibly be I think zigzag is one of the essential principles of a truly intellectual life so I recommend it to all of you you never know what things you need to read at a particular time you've got to make time to go read them when Mark Twain said he didn't want to let school get in the way of his education he knew something and I feel like the University of Chicago when it's at its best knows that same thing so I hope that those of you who are young use this again this opportunity while you're at Chicago to let your mind grow and become active so that it's not controlled by what somebody assigns to you but rather it's controlled from the inside about what you find that you need those of you who are old I hope you set a good example to those who are young one of the things having children taught me was the living before witnesses made me a better man I have three daughters and I realized very early on that every time I said something to their mother I was teaching them how they should have men talked to them and that made me a better husband too so some of what brings me to my topic comes from my experience at the University of Chicago when I was a sophomore and the guys four guys I was living with got tired of me always talking about play-doh so for my birthday in November they got together and purchased the collected Platonic dialogues and the old bawling and princeton university press series for me and i didn't go to class for three weeks and just read of all I recommend that zigzag to all of you at some point in your career but Plato has always been the hub of the wheel for me his is the mind I have found most productive to try to settle myself into and so what I'm going to talk to you about tonight flows first and foremost really from my own attempt to get inside plato's mind particularly the way shows us his mind in the famous dialogue the symposium that is the drinking party probably the single most influential and important work written about erotic love in the entire Western tradition but for me reading Plato and thinking about Plato has always gone hand in hand with trying to grow up as a particular kind of Catholic intellectual both as a teacher but also just as a thinker just as an individual so that I find myself Plato is often the way to a deeper appreciation of something that my trying to live life as a Catholic also brings to me or demands of me it might be a little surprising to think that Plato's symposium mostly a discussion among men celebrating in various ways the erotic love of men for other men would come to seem to somebody like me as a kind of marriage manual in the Catholic tradition a companion piece say to the famous papal encyclical Humanae Vitae but so it is and that really was one of the ideas behind what became my book Plato's bedroom ancient wisdom and modern love so let me take up a few themes where I found that the conversation between Plato and more specifically Catholic themes about marriage about sexuality about love about the nature of God where those themes me to catch fire from each other in this respect I suppose you could say if you wanted a more traditional frame that for me Plato is the voice of nature the voice that then grace could perfect from for my own mind that's a rather mechanical way of seeing the relationship between nature and grace I don't think that nature becomes fully visible to us without the aid of grace so for me it's not as if nature is foundational and then grace is just a superstructure instead I think that through and through our experience of the natural world when we fully open our hearts and minds - it doesn't produce grace but does make us ready to accept its invitation so as I talked about plato and sometimes in light of both the Old Testament and the New Testament I hope that you see that there's a continuity in the attempts to think both with Scripture and with Plato one is not simply the foundation or the check on the other the conversation that's produced by thinking your way down into the claims the demands and indeed the practical principles of both Plato and of the Bible seems to mean a make of philosophy something much richer than it would be without both of those voices even if hearing voices in your head is not usually the recommended path of Education it seems to me that another thing I learned from Plato is that the core of real cognition the real intellectual life is not precept it's imitation I feel like I learned how to think by imitating Plato of course sometimes I seemed like a pretentious University of Chicago undergraduate I'm sure I still seem that way sometimes but to my mind imitation is a sense part of what cognition amounts to so they're trying to enter into another great mind where you can find yourself more truly and more strange as well as Stephen said that seems to me often the heart of the most real education of all so let me turn my attention to some of Plato's ideas about the nature of love and when I say love here I mean the kind of love that makes you find somebody sexually attractive so I'm talking about erotic love or what we sometimes call romantic love not a I would prefer to use the term erotic love because I think eros is the most important phenomenon eros comes from the name of a god the god eros and the symposium is a set of reflections on what that God might be how does the divine enter into our lives from the special energy of sexual desire for Plato that seems like a reasonable path of thought I think it should seem like a reasonable path of thought for us to if there were no erotic desire there'd be no marriage I think that marriage for many not for all I think for many I think marriage will be the place where their moral lives reach the highest pitch and so to look at what Plato does through the eyes of what marriage can be is one way to feel the demand that the symposium can make upon us the symposium begins or almost begins with a questioning a questioning of the example of Socrates because there's a rather irritating guy named Apollodorus who is asked to tell the story apparently he knows it about some famous banquet at the tragic poet Agathon's house that Socrates and the famously charismatic and dissolute Alcibiades were both attending Apollodorus has been asked to tell this story a couple of times in two days so something must be going on but it turns out that the famous meeting between Socrates and Alcibiades that Agathon's actually happened about a decade and a half earlier why is everybody so interested in it now well I think Plato has constructed this symposium very carefully as he often does to place a historical signature the historical signature is everybody's interested in the story of Socrates and Alcibiades now even though it happened a decade and a half earlier because right now Socrates has just been arrested on a criminal charge it turns out that Plato gives you all the necessary breadcrumbs to follow the trail back to when the meeting at Agathon's house was it turns out the timing is such that it's now when Apollodorus is being asked to retell this old story it's now 399 BC which is when Socrates is arrested and that's executed on the charge of bringing in novel gods and corrupting the youth the most important youth of all that he corrupted was Alcibiades so the entire dialogue takes place under the shadow of the question of whether Socrates is influenced on a man like Alcibiades was a bad thing whether he corrupted Alcibiades in that respect the symposium like many of Plato's dialogues is another apology for Socrates it's an account of why Socrates despite some appearances was a good influence rather than a bad one to read the symposium as a kind of defence of Socrates then is to take on the puzzling and uncanny character of Socrates both as lover and as beloved throughout the dialogue Socrates is presented to us as a virtually unique character very difficult to compare to anybody else including the great heroes of the past and also very difficult to imitate Apollodorus the grouchy man at the beginning tries to imitate Socrates by simply being harsh with everybody and dumping moral critiques on them hectoring them the companion who has asked Apollodorus what's the story about Socrates and Alcibiades and Agathon's responds to Apollodorus as harsh ways by saying Apollodorus I don't know why everybody calls you softy because you're always harsh with everybody except for Socrates the first imitator of Socrates comes on the stage in the symposium as a man who thinks he's a real man he's a tough guy he's harsh you come to him you'll get the hard truth but in fact he's a softy he's full of emotion and fretfulness in Plato's Phaedo the dialogue about the day Socrates dies Apollodorus is beside himself weeping and wailing the whole time the other manly men who are Socrates on the day he dies remember at the beginning of the Phaedo socrates sends his wife and children away turns to his old friend credo he says credo so I take that woman home the Phaedo in acts and expulsion of the feminine in favor of the masculine Apollodorus is too effeminate he's crying and weeping the whole time and at the end of the dialogue Socrates drinks the poison right Socrates is cheerful we're all like Socrates right we don't when we're when we die or when our friends die we all feel cheerful right it feels fine that's not a big deal to us we take Socrates side in defeat oh right not that weeping friends who the hell are they bunch of unmanly men Apollodorus is the most unmanly of them all in fact he cries and weeps so much that all the other manly men break down and start to cry that's the story of the day Socrates died and Socrates turns to them and he says this is why I sent the women and children away the Phaedo is a massive enactment of one way of founding philosophy founding philosophy is the hyper-masculine exclusion of the feminine but of course it failed because the friend still cried when I read the Phaedo I don't know about you you might be more manly when I read the Phaedo I actually don't imitate the cheerful Socrates death I imitate the crying friends I'm not sure maybe I didn't learn enough from the Phaedo maybe the way I found philosophy for me is quite different from the way the Phaedo is often inherited as founding philosophy in this hard kind of masculinity the masculinity that rejects Apollodorus and the other weeping friends the masculinity that is like credo who takes the woman out but when credo comes back he cried to the Phaedo does in a tragic mood what the symposium does in a comic mood Apollodorus tells the story again this guy who's pretending to be so tough but is actually so soft right some uncanny combination of the hard and the soft Apollodorus tells the story about how when everybody finally gets to this drinking party one of them raises his hand he says let's talk about how much we're gonna drink tonight this must have been a university go drinking party right there well let's have a theory of our drinking here what what are we gonna do it turns out this is the night after the big victory party that Agathon had just had he'd won in the tragic competitions and that means just about everybody there has a terrible hangover and so one of the guys says you know how much we got a drink tonight and they kind of take a poll and the the lightweight drinkers say uh uh what I have to drink a lot tonight so who do they ask well any of you ever been to a theater party they ask the theater guys right so they ask Aristophanes the great comic poet and they ask Agathon the great tragic foot they say well before we decide how much to drink how are you guys gonna do cuz you're the big drinkers in this bunch right you're the strong guys notice that that also is an emblem of manliness of toughness of how strong they are and Aristophanes says so Mikey I can't drink tonight I was really baptized in it last night and Agathon says yeah i know i'm too weak I can't drink tonight and so they decide okay that's great we're going to have just moderate drinking only drink for pleasure why not to catch up with somebody else they only drink for pleasure and one other thing that we're gonna do how about this flute girl it's at the door you know at a symposium you know kind of it's elite culture gonna have some musical entertainment so you hire a flute girl she comes in and plays the flute it's actually sounded more like a woodwind instrument but so you have a flute player come in now it turns out at a Greek symposium you got two men lying on couches that's the way that they organized it and often there was some sexual activity involved with the flute player a little after hours so when one of the participants says well how about this flute player do we want her in here and they all decide no we don't want music what we want are arguments so first they exclude the god Dionysus the god of wine they say it's because they want to focus on rationality but in fact it's because they're too weak they're too weak to give themselves over to Dionysus philosophy that presents itself as strength actually is enacted to us as weakness and then why don't they have the flute girl is it really because they're so committed to the life of reason that they don't want to have any music or is this another symptom of a weakness masquerading as a strength they exclude the feminine she comes back when the drunken Alcibiades comes back wearing the emblems of Dionysus at the end of the dialogue he brings his own flute girl it all comes back so Plato has constructed the symposium in the same large-scale way he constructed the Phaedo in the Phaedo in a tragic mode we see at the beginning of the dialogue the ejection of the feminine but we see it returned with redoubled force at the moment when they know Socrates is going to die and even Socrates direct direct command to exclude the feminine I sent the women and children away so I didn't have to put up with the fretfulness and fuss of this crime even Socrates direct command is not enough to exclude it philosophy has to found itself in that tragic mode within something that that culture codes is feminine and that can't be gotten rid of in the symposium in a more comic mode you see this hyper masculine ideology trying to found itself as the true site of philosophy the true site of philosophy will be a masculine site but they're wrong because it's an ideology it's based on a weakness not on a strength but then what would the strength really be well you might think the strength would be some sort of androgyny to use a word that comes up centrally in the dialogue that is it would be some way of founding philosophy that involved an integration of what this culture codes as masculine and feminine rather than of simply privilege in the one over the other that I think is the project of Plato's symposium if somebody asks tell me in one word what the theme of Plato's symposium is I would not say love I would say androgyny the question is whether philosophy can found itself with enough complexity to include things that this culture has regimented as separate and as privileged one set over the other now where is this going to go how would that project of integration work well it's a long dialogue and it's a short night so I won't go into everything here but probably the most famous part of Plato's symposium certainly competing with Socrates famous ladder of love speech is the speech of Aristophanes where he gives this wonderful myth about how the original nature of human beings is as big spheres big globes and in our original form we are each self-sufficient and we come in three flavors they're not actually sexes in one kind of globular self-sufficient being it's all male in another kind it's all female and in the other it's half male and half female the spherical nature of the original human beings it turns out is an imitation of the celestial gods that is to say Aristophanes says to really understand human nature you have to see us in our perfect form as made in the image and likeness of God's human nature as we experience it is the result of the hubris the pride the overreaching that this original state of self sufficiency provoked in us because we were powerful and self-sufficient we wanted to displace the gods it wasn't enough to be an image of the gods we had to be the gods naturally enough the gods did nothing so very much of this project and so Zeus used his Thunderbolts to cut these beans in half we are the broken halves we are what's left once human nature is wounded so Aristophanes looks at this claim to strength and manliness that tries to protect itself by claiming its philosophy he looks at that and he says there's something false in that what's false is you're not noticing your own woundedness you're refusing to look at it and so what Aristophanes does is to tell a story that helps us to see it now when our stuff tells this story it creates a very interesting account of the nature of erotic love erotic love is the drive to reunion our original perfect state of spherical self-sufficiency can never be fully read this our human life it's possible only in the mythic world but we are driven to unite or reunite with someone who can complete us someone who in so far as it's possible now we'll overcome that wound and bring us back to a state of completeness now Aristophanes gives a lot of interesting detail to this account of completion the detail I want to focus on here is what he says about the nature of these unions with regard to procreation Aristophanes is only the fourth speaker the three previous speakers all take on this much more masculine ideology their account of erotic love and of its motivations says nothing about procreation imagine an account of sexuality that was forgetful of the very fact that sexual intercourse produces children well you don't have to imagine all you got to do is walk around town that's us that's where we live now it's like it's a surprise geez babies where the hell they come from Plato is enacting exactly that cultural forgetfulness these men for being all manly I'm eating their philosophers right their philosophy majors they're all manly they're tough they're tough minded they're drunk all the time but they're tough right the real man when they think about about sex about their own erotic desires it's not exactly that women disappear some of that too it's more the children disappear because when they think of themselves as coupling they don't think of themselves as creators it's Aristophanes who challenges that Aristophanes suggests that the gods have given human beings sexual coupling in order for us to overcome our loneliness and woundedness and insofar as we can return toward that original state of union but that state of Union would perish there'd be no new generation unless the gods also provided for that pursuit of Union in sexuality to be procreative it's only Aristophanes who introduces that notion into the symposium but from the time he introduces it it runs through all the other speeches so I think that Plato's mind saw a certain masculine ideology about the foundation of philosophy he wanted to overcome it he wanted to overcome it in a way that gave a truer in one's tempt it's a rounder picture of human nature and in his time in place that meant seeking for an androgynous ideal that integrated things that could only happen with both men male and female characteristics let's think some about how Aristophanes myth and Plato's deployment of it that interacts with various features of call it biblical or Catholic views of sexuality let me start from the basic idea that we are created in the image and likeness of gods the Aristophanes completely direct and explicit on this but what kind of gods the celestial gods that Aristophanes has in mind when he says that the original perfect self-sufficient spheres image the gods are primarily images of exactly that self-sufficiency they don't need other things they're powerful and they don't perish now those all sound like good things for a God to have if a God can have those things but you notice something's completely missing from that the image and likeness of God should be put into conversation with human beings being made in the image and likeness of the one God male and female he created them why is it in the him to creation at the beginning of the book of Genesis that it first says that humans are created in the image of God without sexual differentiation but then immediately interprets the imaging of God in light of sexual differentiation into male and female it doesn't seem that the book of Genesis thinks of God primarily in terms of self sufficient perfection a kind of wonderful isolation what's the context of that bit of Genesis it's a hymn to God's creative activity everything he makes and then he sees that it's good or in the case when he makes us he says it's very good so the long long thousands of years long history of commentary on the book of Genesis has come up with many different ways of understanding what it is for us to be made in the image and likeness of God none of them are as funny as Aristophanes speech but they're pretty good but over and over again they tend to emphasize human beings as being images of God's reason or of God's perfect will no I don't say that those aren't available to us but look the context is a creation him the most obvious way that human beings imitate the God of that creation him is by being procreative Aristophanes speech gets somewhere it gets to the idea that procreative power has some essential connection to erotic life but it doesn't get to the idea that procreative power is itself the center of the imaging of the divine but I think sometimes we should give Plato credit for things he almost thought I think he moves in that direction because his mind sees his imagination captures in the story he writes for Aristophanes the notion that there's something divine about our ability to procreate new life through our pursuit of sexual union so simply as you might say natural theology there's something very exciting about the symposium that's not the light it's usually ready and I would say but I think it should be because we see how a certain image of the gods as self-sufficient is itself insufficient as a natural theology if we think of our own sexual and rhotic powers as having a divine aspect that divine aspect is what opens us to our procreative power now in Aristophanes speech the after the gods have divided human beings and made us weaker and wounded and we seek reunion in sexuality in that return to a physical reunion Aristophanes says that the humans seek reunion but the gods want the human race to continue so they happily arrange human body parts so that the physical expression of reunion also is procreative so there is a human purpose in erotic desire but that purpose is fully in réunion in that kind of union there's also a divine purpose the purpose of procreation but the divine purpose and the human purpose are kept separate so in Aristophanes speech it turns out that it's merely an accident from a strictly human point of view that our sexual desire also makes of us procreative couples babies are accidents divine accidents but they're accidents that thought Plato's mind could not rest in when Socrates comes to give his own speech a couple of speeches later in the symposium Socrates looks back to Aristophanes speech and he accepts a lot of it he accepts the androgynous push to see philosophy as founded in an integration of things that are not merely masculine and not merely feminine and the language is full of both male and female images most obviously Socrates says he learned everything he knows about love from a woman from die tema which given a dialogue in which the first thing they did was kick a woman out so they could learn something about philosophy it's pretty interesting Socrates brings in a woman in speech I admit it's only Alcibiades brings in a real flute girl when I learn more from a flute girl than you did from a professor I'm not sure it depends on the night right Plato wants to confront you with that issue how much of the feminine are you masculine philosophers willing to bring in it's one thing when Socrates brings in a teacher in speech reports a past so another thing when Alcibiades brings in a flute girl right now I play those Minds thinking about it but what Socrates says he learned from diet team among other things is that our erotic drive is through and through a drive for immortality that's the imaging of the gods but that means for human beings the way we image immortality is through procreate in Aristophanes speech the divine purpose of pro creativity and the human purpose of union of intimacy those are kept separate in Socrates speech those are integrated so that the desire for procreation becomes an essential aspect of what the erotic drive is Socrates is suggesting to these men that if they really listen to what their own heart is saying when they fall in love they will see that procreation is a part of what their heart wants it's not just some other thing that happens when they do what their heart wants it's part of what their heart wants in fact one should look at Socrates speech in the symposium as a working out of the consequences of that way of seeing the erotic drive know Socrates clearly thinks that that kind of procreation has about it some sort of divine or sacred aspect it brings us into contact with the divine he's gone even farther than then Aristophanes speech did one thinks here at least I think here of a famous passage from the New Testament famous because almost nobody wants to have to believe it including the Apostles at that moment those from Matthew 19 where some people come in quizzed Jesus about divorce and you don't have to think Jesus was divine I do but you don't have to to think it was a hell of an interesting teacher because he was that too and when people came and asked Jesus about divorce what he said was your hardness of heart and he's talking to men right this is another very masculine context your hardness of heart is why you have divorce but what I tell you is there isn't any divorce marriage produces a new being and what God's drawing human beings can't sever the image is it's uncanny how close it is to something in Aristophanes image but maybe more striking is that in that passage Jesus goes back to Genesis he goes back to the very passage that we've been that male and female we are created jesus says from the beginning like Aristophanes he uses an original state as the measure of the hardness of heart of our present state that's the procreative aspect of marriage but jesus also cites another passage a little bit farther along in Genesis Adams famous reaction when he first sees Eve when he says flesh of my flesh bone of my bone and this is why a man clings to his wife and they are not two but one that mystery of marital Union so that the rejection of divorce actually combines probably the most famous celebration of sexual Union in the in all of Western culture bone of my bone flesh of my flesh with what must be the most authoritative celebration of the divine feature of the pro creativity of male and female those are both at the heart of Jesus teaching about marriage now what lots of us reject that teaching about marriage that's what the disciples did right after Jesus said this the disciples are there looking at each other out of the side of their eye you know how people are they're kind of and one of them says well and it's better not to get married I mean what if she's a [ __ ] what if he's a drunk I mean it's not prudent Jesus Christ it's not prudent he says it can't be the right way to live I mean I'm going to keep my heart heart heart heart so that's good for philosophy that's good thinking I'm gonna be tough we're gonna have this tender softy heart I'll be exposed that's no good and Jesus looks the guy in the eye and he says you know you're right you might not be cut out for marriage but don't tell me you're not cut out for marriage because you're gonna keep your heart heart the reason you might not be made for marriage is you might be called to open your heart even more than marriage does you might become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven I'm pretty sure the students didn't like that question on the exam they came to the teacher they said look it's what you're suggesting that's imprudent I mean it'd be better not to marry if that's the commitment of marriage and Jesus says you're right there's another thing you could do I mean God what a terrible guy to be around you see where they killed him he's as bad as Socrates the next thing that happens that disciples were terrible students they never learned anything it was only retrospectively they understood this the thanks Jesus said it's like those of you who are undergraduates when you're 30 you'll think oh my god now I understand I know what they were telling me about so the next thing that happens Jesus is resting some people bring their children to Jesus to bless them and the disciples say these are marvelous children please bring them no they say don't bother the master get these children out of here he's thinking and it's not office hours right now and Jesus says bring the kids over here if you don't get more like these children you'll never get to the kingdom of heaven so right after Jesus has given them the doctrine about divorce that these men tried to escape from by keeping their hard hearts and not opening them and Jesus said well you could open your hearts even more if that's what you mean by saying you don't want to get married you want to open your hearts even more that's fine you can do that the next thing they do is send away the children they haven't learned anything about marriage they will but they didn't then Jesus has integrated union and procreation in what he has said about marriage but his very disciples had a hard time letting their hearts open to that Socrates's disciples and their disciples they had a hard time opening their heart to what he was saying about the erotic drive as well they felt the comfort of intimacy but weren't always willing to take on the demand of procreation but what Socrates suggested is what Jesus suggested that when you fully interpret when you let speak when you let your heart hear what your desire for intimacy is really saying you will find within its message the desire for procreation as well indeed they're mutually interpreting the particular type of complete union the mutual self giving that you want your sexuality to express will find its completion only in an openness to the new life that can come from that physical expression I think that Plato means to push some of the same buttons that Jesus meant to push when Jesus said you guys are suffering from hardness of heart he didn't mean primarily that you weren't generous enough in the context of the the Bible the heart is an organ also of perception to have a hard heart is to be hard-of-hearing to refuse to listen to something I think for lots of people in contemporary American culture they actually find it harder to listen to Jesus than they might find it to listen to Socrates I think one way I can help my students become better Catholics is first by helping them become better pagans I think that Plato opens the organ of perception in your heart in a way where sometimes you let down your defenses you'll stop embracing a certain ideology that we're all steeped in because Plato doesn't look as immediately threatening as Jesus does it turns out they're both pretty threatening we live in a place in time where the couple is not the most real thing in most people's lives for better for worse till death those vows only makes sense if when you take those vows a new thing enters the world when you marry this is no longer two people it's one to become one that is not a symbol that is not a metaphor that is a real thing accepting the pro creativity of sexual union is a part of becoming that real thing so it seems to me Plato helped me to acknowledge that I didn't want to acknowledge that when I was a younger man maybe I didn't even know what it was to acknowledge that until I had a child but I am glad that as my life opened up to my wife to my children I am glad that I let that experience open up these texts to reading goes both ways the text enters you as much as you enter it most of us are surely no better students than Jesus own disciples or Socrates own disciples all I can say the interest about that is if you let your sexual powers create a new thing in the world in your love for that person to whom you have a spousal relation you will also want those powers to open up to the new lives of children our world fears children and sees them more as a threat to intimacy than as a completion or an expression of it children enter into romantic movies mostly as comic impediments it's very hard to find a contemporary movie a contemporary story in which an intrinsic part of a couple's erotic desire is to see each as making the other apparent this is a very common human experience that part of what you appreciate about your spouse is exactly that with your spouse you as a couple parent children it's not that your wife makes it possible for you to be a father that's not the way that it works it's instead that you and your wife become a father and a mother and it's that couple that's the most real thing and your children are a constant reminder of the marriage vows and a constant reminder of what it would mean that the two become one flesh does Plato help us to cross the wasteland of the corrupted nature that our contemporary culture gives to us and find the more verdant pastures of a more pagan nature that then can hear what the call of grace might be I would say I've predicated my career as a teacher particularly as a Catholic teacher on a particular answer to that question I hope I've helped you all become a little bit more pagan this very evening thank you [Applause] you the the way Socrates speech works that the the theme of poetry as procreation really is already introduced in agra font speech and so Socrates is picking up some of those themes from the earlier speech and Socrates reports diet EEMA right I mean that's a little difficult to decide where the ethereal voice is here sometimes but reports diet EEMA to suggest that so to speak spiritual children are of higher regard than bodily children so it's true that within the speech you might say that the the notion that pro creativity is intrinsic to the erotic drive its contained a little bit within a kind of philosophical interpretation that doesn't privilege marriage over other forms of life that would be dedicated to activities productive of virtue particularly so it's not just artistic production exactly it's something more like production of virtue different ways the production of virtue would work I think that there's within the text itself I think you can see a moment of hesitation about this when child bearing or child beginning it's quite ambiguous between male and female descriptions when that's introduced as an intrinsic part of the erotic drive it's immediately talked about in terms not just of making the baby as a physical thing but of rearing the child but then in the little bit later passage and it's not much later when you get the privilege een of the spiritual offspring now you get a very reductive account of making the baby as a bodily thing I think that probably represents what Plato himself would have said I think he would have made the reductive comment about your physical children but I think he was that his mind was so active on this that he sees that the rearing of children is a spiritual activity so I think the resources are right there like on the surface of the dialog I don't think I have to dig very far to see a way in which the the second passage that reduces children to like a second best kind of procreation is it's clearly protesting way too much and it's it would be this would be a bigger interpretive task but the the whole context of that speech with diet tema that emphasizes for example in the ladder of love the way that your love for a particular individual first body then soul and then generalizing it leads to an interest in civic culture in legislation and education i think that plato's doctrine of eros naturally leads in that direction I'd say he's somewhat inconsistent in the way he develops the rhetoric of it but the over the the reduction of of marriage and child-rearing in that polemical passage I think is not consistent with lots of his thought it is it's really interesting to go back to the Republic with some of these ideas in mind because the the famous passages that discuss the communism of women and children and education they're a bizarre mixture of a very reductive rhetoric that reduces human childbearing to cattle breeding it actually goes to a language more fit for horse breeding than things at the at the same time that has this very elevated view of Education so I think that Plato never quite freed himself of a certain masculine polemic against mere child-rearing but I think that he comes very close to freeing himself from it so I I think that I would not concede to you just as a direct philosophical point and I I don't say that you're suggesting this is the thing you would want to defend directly I would not concede to you or to Plato that in fact producing poetry or leading a political organization is a higher accomplishment than being a spouse and a parent I wouldn't concede that I agree there are passages where Plato suggests that but I think that they're actually in tension with lots of other passages as well so that'd be the beginning of a longer discussion about how to take up those paths to the play you here would be where I'm gonna start in my own path the marriage vow is for better for worse till death when your spouse dies you're not married anymore and that means so congratulations I got a critique of that so I think that that shows in a way that you didn't become anything because while your wife is still like a good American so I do think that when one spouse dies you do become a new thing but you don't just become the thing you were before you remarried and to try to understand without making it just sound like a quibble about ontology what does it mean that your your one thing before you're married then you become a couple and then if your spouse dies you once again become an uncouple thing that could be coming up another married couple but you don't go back to what you were before you were ever married I think that here to get some philosophical traction we'd want to start to think about warmth and about how going through the process morning when somebody is transformative this is another topic that was very deep down plato's imagination but that he was full anxieties about both the Phaedo and the Republic show that Plato is trying to get control the morning because he sees it as an uncontrolled and therefore an undesirable mode of self transformation in the face of grief yeah I don't know where I want to end up on that set of questions but to make the question of ontological transformation in and out of colors to give it some real human power I think we'd have to go through the experience of mornings and it's fundamental to the transformation that makes us come out the other side so that's some more than a promissory note but what I would say about you the so the the question of alcibiades erotic ambition the that passage in the ounce buttons is not the only place where Plato has Socrates run that thought experiment on somebody but would you be satisfied just to rule your own father as well which it would be satisfied just to rule the welcome Athens would you be satisfied only if you could rule the whole Persian Empire both Greeks and barbarians right that that inflation of tyrannical designer is a very dangerous game that Socrates placed in more than one place Plato's dialogues now I take it that your question tell me if this is right your question is whether the account of the procreated impulse of erotic desire so that the unity of an appropriated or mutually informing does that put some limit on this erotic tyrannical ambition it is that the right version of your question ii think it would just seem odd if Socrates were saying tell us about this what what I love about you is this tyrannical ambition rather than like seem critical in the we do you think about it now it could be turned into something more evolving into the proper sense yeah I think that is what Socrates has an armor because you'll see this another dialogue where this is really wonderfully done as in the license so you see Socrates talking to very young man and he's it's licensed the young man interested in getting more wisdom or knowledge by showing them that in the things where he has knowledge he is given power so that the knowledge is purely instrumental for him Socrates doesn't get him to be intrinsically interested in whistle and knowledge he gets him to think man I want to be as powerful as possible I need more knowledge that's kind of what happens in the first else bias to the Socrates is using this unlimited ambition for power as a way in to get somebody interested in wisdom now what's going to have to happen though at some point Socrates has to have a way to remove the merely instrumental of trusted knowledge so that you start to be interested in knowledge for its own sake because now there's a limit on your political ambition your power rock the trouble is this is goes back to the beginning of the suppose like people thought that Socrates relationship down sub is reflected very poorly on Socrates the problem is that you might have more success in expanding the young man's ambition you're right not only my father's well Athens wealth and even the great king of Persia as well if I look like I know more I'm gonna major in economics so you're gonna run it through that so it's true that your desire for knowledge expands but it's not controlling your ambition for power the question is can Socrates make the conversion can he turn you so that the the knowledge becomes what centrally desired because the desire for knowledge at a certain sense can be so so limited at least it was repaired of power I mean it's not clear that plaintiff shows that that's always going to work he showed Socrates inflating political ambition to the point of tyranny he doesn't only show them successfully deeply were redirecting it but that is a very regular part of what Plato is trying to think through but in the Republic it's the corruption of the best that's the worst the same natural endowment that would make somebody a philosopher can also make somebody a tired and so managing that erotic energy of ambition becomes a central problem for a Socratic philosophy that depends on making your ambition greater but also oriented right ambition it's like a vector it's got both magnitude and directions and you can't always be sure that the thing you did that gave it more magnitude also get out a pointed in the right way so I think that's one of the problems about Socratic philosophizing they can free people from constraints makes their vector a lot bigger but not succeeded in pointing that all that power in the right place and philosophy it's like a it's like a power tool you know it's like chainsaw chainsaw they're great if you know how to use them they make you more powerful but you can also hack off a limb or tooth right it's a dangerous thing that inflection of power so part of Socrates erotic attractiveness to ambitious young man is very dangerous because it inflates their ambition it's not always as successful in chasing them and this is an active in supposing you know it also comes it up as a central topic in the apology thing everybody knows you're not allowed to say you once tell somebody's that jerk because there's a moratorium on that in that legal climate so but everybody knows that's what saga needs to be tried for Alcibiades like Socrates had contempt for democracy and that's what he's being tried for so if the trial that points to some decent guys he influenced to that didn't cut it with the jury they remember the indecent guy so the I would say the issue there about procreation just to focus on that the issue of uh procreation is that that too is a powerful thing I mean you want to be the person who makes your city you want to be the person who makes an empire Alcibiades wanted to run the Sicilian expedition and expand Athens into a huge Western important the Western Empire that is a part of an erotic drop but it's not clear how South was going to rap you I don't see the the way that eros is described in Socrates speech and I Tina's speech in the symposium as the intermediary between the human and the divine and it's clear in that part of Socrates speech he's also giving a self description this kind of uncanny in between this I don't see a biblical version of that that we can aspire to insofar as there's a biblical version of it you'd say it's the incarnation no but that's Jesus as the mediator between God and human beings but I don't think that that aspect of the symposium is something that has an immediate biblical resonance so I think I agree with you about that I don't think the Bible is intended to be a complete account of human moral psychology if I could put it that way so that while I would want to be deliberate in my development of some of these platonic resources in a Christian context I wouldn't regard their absence from a scriptural hex as in itself an objection to the development of the Platonic resources if I thought that to draw on the Platonic resources I had for example to contradict Matthew 19 on the nature divorce I choose Matthew 19 by the discipline by the greater teacher here I don't feel like I've had to confront a contradiction in developing there so the that the wholeness of the truth is contained in Scripture that that's a slogan I would embrace but it doesn't lessen the hermeneutical task to open those things up and I this this would be a very worthwhile conversation to try to develop I used the word developed because my own thinking on this has been influenced by John Henry Newman and his notions of the development of doctrine so but that that's obviously a longer kind of conversation you let me start from the notion of in love than to think some about them because one one reasonable worry here is that if you privilege what Plato calls the erotic you're privileged in a like a passing state of excitement or of ecstasy however important that state may be as opposed to a habitual response to the other person with love and well I like Plato better than Aristotle like Aristotle - I think Aristotle is simply right I mean here is a description of my life every good thing I do it's because I've established a habit in it so that love I don't want to say that love can do without the affective ecstasy's of being in love that's not what I mean to say but I want to say that being in love should be understood not just as an occurrence state but as a habit a habitual mode of practice that you have with your spouse so I myself think that for most people Effect 2 is something that can be habitual I don't say it can be completely at our command but I think it can be habitual so that the symposium doesn't have much to say about the ongoingness of loving relationship I don't see a lot of resources in it for that it's more interested in a few particular structural features of erotic love yet so Aristotle say in the friendship books of the ethics is much more interested in the ongoingness of loving relationship so I think that to me your question pushes me to to ask how can you articulate this ongoingness of the commitments of love and yet hold on to the sense of ecstasy the excitement of being in love as an essential part of that for myself I don't let sometimes you'll hear an opposition between more emotional love and a practical love as people will put it I'm not very happy about that because I think for most of us most of the time habits of love involve that affective character they're not just dutiful I don't want to say they can't be dutiful but I don't think that's I wouldn't recommend that as the path of moral formation what does marriage and it's obligations devolved with something just legalistic and and is that he's had enough hold on is that enough reason to continue to seek love in that relationship maybe to be redeemed the resurrected some analysts borrow some terminology or-or-or we just accept the limitation of that relationship do what we can and then find friendship or studies yeah the you know Jesus words are very hard words and very explicit words on divorce and [Applause] I'm like the disciples in many ways except I decided to take the chance and I don't see ya this is a very particular matter of how to read that passage obviously within the 2,000 years of Christian interpretation people have done a lot of things with the divorce passages and I think they're just inescapable there are very few passages where Jesus lays down a very particular law like that one so if if you push on me the question if your relationship to your spouse has become evacuated of the effective resources that sustain us in being in love and in marriage what do we do all I have left to tell you is that's the cross I would have to bear and I wouldn't be willing to tell another person to bear that cross unless I would acknowledge that I would have to bear that cross I'm lucky I haven't had to bear that cross but if if my best friend in the world came to me and said you know I don't feel in love with my wife anymore I would tell him that she's still your wife I wish I had something that wasn't so damn hard to say but I can't find my way to say in anything else [Applause]

Channel: Lumen Christi Institute

Views: 843

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Plato, Symposium, David O'Connor, Lumen Christi Institute, Eros, Plato's Bedroom

Id: SNtRsGcHQlU

Length: 83min 14sec (4994 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2017