Welcome everyone. First, let me just introduce myself. I'm Louis Sloskey. I'm one of the editors and co-founders of political animal press, which is a press dedicated to real philosophy and serious political thought.
Obviously, our meeting tonight, this panel discussion tonight, is on Alex Prius' new book, Musings on Plato's Symposium. I want to say that the panel will ensure the discussion will focus in many ways on the substance of the book and to some extent on the type of book that it is. I want to say something quickly about that latter, what type of book it is from the perspective of the publisher. And first, I simply want to say that this book was a pleasure to work on.
I had the good luck of making a friend in the author over the course of working on it, and that doesn't always happen. But it isn't entirely surprising in this case as Alex and I had a number of friends in common, and I'll just mention our good friend, the remarkable Plato scholar, Travis Mulroy, David Barr with whom Alex runs a podcast called the New Thinkery, also with Greg McRayer. And our friends Paul D. Duke and Andy Qualtruck with whom Alex teaches.
Second, I want to say that from the outset of this project, we regarded this book as a kind of challenge. And we mean that by which I mean a challenge to other thinkers and other authors. It's not at all uncommon here and now to hear complaints about the way one must write in order to publish about philosophic and political subjects in today's academy. The demands of the system itself, the ideological commitments of parts of the system, the technical jargon, and the requirement to make certain kinds of arguments or engage with certain kinds of irrelevant scholarship, part of the cause of insight and the cause of communication.
If one looks at any number of great examples of writing on such subjects from the past, they are almost unrecognizable by comparison to current offerings. And especially as our world sadly darkens, it seems there is a need to find modes and orders by which real education can be served, both for the sake of better political understanding and for the sake of the philosophic life, for friends and potential friends of that way of life. But how many people are willing and able to write books that attempt to speak differently? At least one such person is our author tonight, Alex Preel.
He's written a very good book indeed, one on one of the most important works by one of the very greatest philosophers that is Plato and his symposium and on the subject of love, which is so fundamental in importance to human life. And Alex has done so by writing a book that is philosophic without being scholarly. In my view, that takes some real courage. And I think we ought to admire that in Mr.
Preel. Again, it is a challenge to other authors and thinkers. If you think you can write good books that are different than what is out there, go write them. There are people who want to publish and read them.
And perhaps it is so that times of crisis are also in some measure times of opportunity. It seems to me that this is a course by which such opportunity might be well exploited. So with that to our excellent panel, I'm just going to introduce everyone. Dr.
Alex Preel is teaching assistant professor in the Herx program for engineering, ethics, and society at the University of Colorado Boulder and faculty fellow at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. He is again the author of Musings on Plato's Symposium, the subject of our conversation tonight. Dr. Jeff Black is a tutor at St.
John's College in Amplus. Dr. David Levy is a tutor at St. John's College Santa Fe.
And Dr. Michael McShane is director of Public Humanities of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. So I want to thank all of you for being here. And with that, I'm going to turn things over to the author of Musings on Plato's Symposium.
Alex Preel for some opening remarks. And I will slip away as those remarks are made in the conversation. Thanks, everyone. Alex.
Thank you, Louis. Thank you for publishing the book and also for having the courage to go on Zoom with als abidies bits and pieces over your shoulder. Also, I want to, sorry, I wanted to give Michael an opportunity to say a quick word about the Dallas Institute because I think some of the people watching might be interested. Thanks, Alex.
With regard to the Dallas Institute, we do lots of things. And one thing I would just like to put in a plug for is that every summer we run, I think, all the studios and super teachers, it's for K through 12 teachers. Our goal is to honor teachers by helping them to get in touch again to renew their contact with the thing that perhaps got them involved in this teaching in the first place, which is the love of learning. So we'd be classic literature every summer for three weeks.
If you're interested to know more about this, please contact me, McShane, at m McShane at Dallas Institute dot org. Thank you, Al. Thank you, Michael. So I'll say just as what by way of a sort of brief introduction that first of all, Louis, your praise was too high.
And in the middle of it, I got a text message from David saying, I don't deserve this much praise. It just shows that I shouldn't have friends like that. David treats my our mutual friend, Greg, for better for anybody wants an image of that kind of friendship, just turned to page 29 of the book. But to the present point, I'll just say that this kind of event, I'm really grateful for it because, you know, when writing a book, there's always a strange sort of publicity about it.
And when writing a scholarly book in particular about Plato as well, there's a strange tension between or sort of opposition between the way in which one is compelled to write, and the way in which one discusses it with your friends. And so when I was teaching a seminar last fall in the symposium, because I was asked to write something on Strauss in the symposium and found myself writing, you know, the dialogue came together, I found myself writing the snippets, and I thought these more adequately reflect the way I read Plato, I like to discuss Plato. And so more than anything I wrote this book, just because I was enjoying writing these little sort of affresilators or vignettes. But also because I thought that it would be a nice invitation to conversation to people who might want this sort of thing here about it and enjoy talking about it.
And one of the sort of pleasant things, most pleasant things about writing this book has been engaging in conversation with others. And so the symposium is in a way about philosophy and poetry, and why a philosopher who could write or one one why one writes at all. And in thinking about writing and what exactly I'm trying to do, and sort of just capturing a little bit of why I enjoy this book, ended up giving me a sort of greater appreciation of the sort of invitation and provocation to conversation that a book can be. And so whereas, you know, I wrote a book on the premedities, I felt like I was trying to answer all the right questions here.
I felt like I was just trying to ask the right questions and put those before people. And so I'm hoping to get some good questions and asking the questions and have a good conversation today. So I'll leave it at that. We don't have an order of things, so I don't know.
Maybe why don't you kids have to say something? Yeah, maybe I'd be happy to take our first stand at this. So thanks Alex for writing this book. I really enjoyed reading it.
It made me think more about the symposium and more about it than I have in a long time, especially about Socrates' speech. So I appreciated it certainly for that reason. And I thought maybe, because a lot of the questions that we shared beforehand had to do with Socrates, we could start by trying to talk a little bit about Socrates eroticism. One of the observations that you make and that you return to from time to time is perhaps surprising coldness in Socrates' relationship to beauty, a coldness that also biases characterizes.
And that you mentioned early on as Socrates' moderation. But we've got this against the backdrop of the possibility that arrows is a cosmic principle, is something that extends throughout nature. So maybe just a place to start would be to try to characterize the respect in which Socrates is erotic, if in any respect. Yeah, I mean, it's maybe the core question of the symposium where philosophy is presented as a form of arrows, which on a certain level makes some sense, but maybe not on the most fundamental level, which is I guess, which are getting at with the coldness.
I mean, there's a, when the young Socrates in Socrates' speech has a kind of chilly reception of the beautiful, he's not is not evident to him, why, what it really gives you, whereas when it comes to the good or the good things, he's sort of quick, yeah, that would make me happy to have good things obviously. And so evidently, there's some disjunct between the beautiful and the good slash happiness for him, which Deetima tries to counter and argue against, and which again, I argue Socrates doesn't meet with the warmest reception, not to say that he's completely indifferent to its sort of importance in philosophy. And obviously, what he does with our societies and what he does with Agathon involves the kind of beautification of philosophy, associating the philosophic life with certain promises that might be extrinsic to it. But it might be a sort of healthy confusion that sort of raises one up toward the activity, allows you to see that it's the best avenue, or maybe the only avenue to the satisfaction.
And perhaps that charm needs to be broken, but the charm is broken not with philosophy, but with that other wish or sort of hope that's involved. So there is a kind of chilliness, you could say, is not as chilly, I think, as Agathon's view of the world, which is exceedingly, maybe excessively nihilistic, but it is certainly not as optimistic as we might want, and certainly not as optimistic as a sort of first reading of Socrates' speech would suggest. Do you like the formulation that Socrates feels arrows or experiences of arrows for the good? There's something you said early on that suggested that that might be a problematic or a transitional formulation, but could we just say a little bit more about what's problematic about that statement?
Yeah, it's difficult because the republic is somewhat helpful here, but one thing I was struck by when I was teaching the last time was tracing exactly where the good comes up and the beautiful comes up, whereas initially it's about the good things. And I worry that turning the good things into an ADOS or an idea as the good, giving it that sort of unity and absolute quality involves some over-association that the beautiful, if that makes sense. That making it a first principle, as it is in the republic and as seems to be suggested, they're not really in a more subtle way in the symposium, that that involves abstracting from and losing a sense of the concrete goods of actual life, real goods that you experience and enjoy. I'm not sure if that's eros, I guess is my point.
Though it might involve an element of eros and mediate it or something. Right, so something like saying that eros is a strong drive towards whatever your goal might happen to be, the sort of move that the idea team tries to make much generalize it, that some people have eros for the beautiful, but others have eros for other things. That is a kind of misrepresentation of eros, which really is close to the tide that's beautiful, right? And to the hope, maybe for immortality, that the beautiful brings with it.
Yeah, I think eros, one way to make this a bit less abstract and more tangible is to talk about how, when we think about what would make us happy, what would be a good life, we tend to like to draw a picture of that life and come with a vision, I don't know if vision can be manifested or something like that. And there's something very, I think, important about that process, right? You have to think about where your life is going to be, what you'd like to do. But when you think about actual good things in life, it's often they come despite that vision, right?
And so we do sort of fall in love with a version of ourselves, a sort of idealized version of our life that involves certain ends being attained. But I think when you sort of actually step back and live life, it's often despite those ends. And we often find that the even achieving those goals is not as enjoyable as sort of working towards them and thinking about them and all those sorts of things. And that's, so that would be one sort of problem.
The way this shows up in the symposium is in a way the lovers of Socrates who tend to idealize him and turn him into a kind of model. It's a version of what you see, it's a sort of dramatic version of what you see in the argument, but also in the action of the Republic, where you get these pure models of heroes and gods. And these are somehow to be emulated and glock on, seek, stimulate them, and sort of ends up alarming as a guardian or something like that. That sort of, it's a version of falling in love with another person, but one in which you model yourself.
So this is a risk to deem, it's effectively the idealized, ugly, false and love tries to model him, falls short and thereby forgets the actual goods that he might be able to have, this he's trying too hard to sort of. And so there's, I think it's important to sort of craft those visions, but to do so really and then to reassess them so really, and always to have one's one eye on your actual life. And that seems a little too realistic and concrete to be the subject of arrows because no one good thing that you experience will be the be all end of your life, a good meal, good conversation, an interesting thought. Those are things that come and go and if you miss them, you might have it another time, it's not the sort of decisive be all end all moment or sort of event in your life that seems more characteristic of arrows, right, where, you know, flesh of my flesh, my bones, this one of us is mine, right, that concrete feeling of fulfillment in another, whether it be a person or a romantic beloved or or vision of yourself.
That last comment made me wonder about something, well, really, the whole rest of your comments limiting arrows and separating it from all desire for the good, let me just think about the fact you observed it somehow in your book that there's no arrows for anything other than other human beings in the letter of love. It's subordinated to the lower levels. That's right. It seems to drop out, which suggests something something's happening to it.
But even in the lower levels, there's not arrows for the laws and practices. Yeah. So it makes me wonder if Plato's not saying in the strict sense, there's really only love of other human beings. It might be the case.
I mean, it's difficult because the further this gets at the self affirming versus self negating parts of arrows. And I wonder whether, and so, you know, the symposium is in many ways related to the Fido, right, symposium goes all night, Fido all day, symposium happens with a rooster, the Fido ends with a rooster as well. One's about love, one's about death. And in fact, you get a formula for philosophy in the Fido, as arrows is dying and being dead, sorry, philosophy is dying and being dead.
But the way this is explained is as an arrows for thoughtfulness or phronuses. And there, it said that they want to love, they want to see and be with it, which is the exact formula used from the symposium. So my way of thinking about this is that, whereas there's a sort of self negating asceticism is characteristic of the Fido, there's self affirming reproduction that's characteristic of the symposium, which is most obvious reproduction of yourself in sexual reproduction, level of another person. And so that would be, you could say the paradigm for arrows, and maybe that's why it's most associated with this lower level.
And certainly as you go up these levels, I think there's a peculiar thing that happens when he when did team applies, heres of another reproduction to not obviously reproductive things like the giving of laws and practices or writing of, of, of, you know, epic poetry or invention, where it seems like the offspring there is somehow accommodating that for which it is an offspring, right? Or another way to put it is that the laws and practices need to fit the pre-existing people. And there, it seems to apply not a self affirmation, but a self negation. And so perhaps arrows drops out because at that point, arrows is now being somehow diluted or, or somehow appropriated to this self negating, sort of, it's a self affirmation by way of the other that involves, I think, too much of a negation of yourself.
Does that make sense? I mean, obviously in reproduction, there's on a combination of somebody else, right? Is reproduction with another person? But it seems like looking at law giving and poetry, writing of poetry as self affirmation, misses something crucial in that process.
I'm not sure if that works as an answer, but... Well, and one thing I take from what you're saying that I think is clearly missing is one doesn't get the good for oneself for all time from any of those forms of reproduction. I don't think so. This comes up really clearly in, it discusses an section called always, but the way Ia is used, that's the Greek word for always, is really ambiguous.
Socrates accepts that arrows is of the good being one's own always. But when she, the itima, then takes it and makes it about a desire for immortality, he resists. And the only way to make sense of this as far as I can make sense of it is to say that Ia there does not mean always, but it means all the time, which is another meaning, like to continue. Now it's very ambitious to want to have the good all the time, but it's not necessarily all the time for the complete duration of an event being one's life, right?
To want that all the time might be ambitious, but it might be humanly sort of sensible to always be seeking the good and trying to achieve it through one's whole mind, whether that means to try to attain immortality, a great sacrifice in the present for an uncertain immortality, and even a questionable whether it's even you that's being pursued, there's so many questions here. I think that's where the immortality question is something that does not necessarily appeal to even the young Socrates. So that that passage where Socrates goes silent, she's also turned to this confusing language about be getting in the beautiful, right? So that there's another reason he could resist it, but there's something in the way you're phrasing it that strikes me and it's a somewhat different way of looking at it where it seems like you're thinking about what would be the best way for humans to be through life and this sacrificing definite goods for hypothetical immortality doesn't look like such a great idea.
But couldn't you look at the passage as just saying this is fundamentally what humans want? This beam. The good for oneself always in the strict sense. It might be, and I think the question you're sort of edging up against is whether that wish can be or that hope can ever be sort of eliminated.
So that's one key question, can that wish ever be eliminated? But another one is, is the existence of that wish crucial for understanding everything said about arrows afterwards? Yeah, I think so to a certain degree. I mean, my general sense of where Socrates comes out in this is that, and so when he's open to speech and says I'm going to sort of put things out of order effectively, is what he says.
I think what you're meant to do is to plug in the first part of the speech afterwards and ask, okay, they've taken this, he rejects the beautiful in the favor of the good. They have this exposition of the good, then the good becomes, you want to have it be yours forever or always, however that's supposed to be meant. And then that says, well, then you need to be getting the beautiful, right? That's the next move.
And then it never returns to the good. And so you have to kind of put it back together. And I think one can justify some commitment to reproduction or production as it were, depending on what part of the latter, you're thinking about because I'm not sure that the higher level is reproduction, but you can have some sort of qualified commitment to it in light of this other longing. I'm not sure to give an example that when Plato writes, he does so out of a wish for immortality.
I think he writes in such a way as to prepare for the fact that the whole history of philosophy might be footnuts for him, but that it serves multi-valence purposes. One being, perhaps this will get into hands of somebody down the line. Perhaps this will be of service to the academy. Perhaps this will be service to my friends, right?
There's tears of that. Whether that wish, perhaps this will be 2500 years of footnuts, perhaps whether that wish, if he had that wish, was a wish for immortality, I don't know. I mean, that's a very difficult question to answer, but it strikes me that it's doing multiple things at once. I'm not sure if that helps address that issue.
I will it could and I certainly don't think Plato thought in any serious way he would be immortal. But I guess another thing I'm wondering about is so I think maybe more than the new I'm looking at this, I'm saying, okay, so we start out with humans want the good for themselves for all time. You could call that happiness and Aristotle sense a good tuition or could be out of it. And then we get this business about beginning in the beautiful and it's very unclear what that has to do with anything.
And one and I had this hunch there just mysteries put there to try to make you put it together and why was the beautiful crucial? Right. So some of us turn forward reproductive immortality, according to the official teaching, but she insists humans can only do that with the beautiful. She doesn't insist that with animals and you could say fitness and evolutionarily animals do have some concern about fitness, but that can't be identified with the beautiful.
Yeah, well, it's difficult with animals and Darwinism. I'm thinking of a when I was at St. John's, Jason, to give an excellent paper on Darwinism where he pointed certain animals go extinct because certain traits are deemed beautiful, but they're actually not advantageous. Say we're two tigers having big tusks.
Oh, whatever. You know, and so there's some kind of now I don't know what's going through a female saber to tigers head. I'm sure it's a mystery to male saber to tigers, even at the time. But there are there is some evidence within evolutionary theory for beautiful but not advantageous traits being selected, perhaps as symbols of fitness, but not actual markers of fitness.
I don't know that affects your argument, but maybe just the crucial thing is for some reason for humans, beautiful is essential. No one says beautiful is essential for animals, even if there's some realm of beauty in animal life. I agree, that seems to me. Well, but so why should that be if the point is just reproduction?
Yeah, so there's there's obviously some, well, I think on one level, if you take the model of poetry, right, the beautiful poem or the attractive poem guarantees it a kind of endurance, right? And so the the ladder of love, which I really take to be a ladder of beauties more than really of love for the reasons we've already laid out. But the idea is the closer you get to true, right, the more your the beauties you produce, right? True beauty, you know, as he puts it, as he puts it, the closer you get, the more beautiful the thing you produce will be from various perspectives in time and place, she puts it, right?
So the more absolutes, the more you're touched with the true beauty, the more absolute the beauty is doing. Now there's a problem there, because by her own account, reparticulizing the beautiful immediately makes it not absolutely beautiful and absolutely beauty is not accessible to all. So there's a fundamental tension here at the problem of her. But the idea, at least on the surface of the argument, is that people need to find whatever it is you're producing or reproducing beautiful in order to continue to honor it, praise it, and for it to have this this stimuli, lack of immortality that she's sort of advancing as the goal of of our love of the good.
Does that make some sense? Now, I'm not sure it makes sense, but in the poets and the lawgivers, she also describes them as having human beloveds, right? And I think there's something crazy about the way it suggested, but as if people would only write great poetry, be cut in order to impress a beloved or something like that. But so what I have in mind is in each case, there's a devotion to a beautiful human being.
Yeah, and you could even wonder if the lawgivers aren't rather, how would I say, are not picking enough about the people they consider themselves worthy of devoting themselves to whole communities of people. So as your point that love of the, so I mean, the way the conversation was going before was questioning whether love of the good is erotic. And you and you have been pushing the line that well, not even you're not even sure that love of the beautiful is in all cases, erotic. That's true.
But what I'm really pushing toward is this thought that devotion to beauty makes people hope for personal immortality. Yeah. Right. And so there's another sign of it, Deodema teaches like a perfect office.
And she says, the best people are just out for honor. And that should be an appalling statement to a normal person. And you definitely focus on its sophistry. But then she says, they do everything for the sake of immortal virtue, and such a reputation.
And so she drops something to a serious human being much more important in there than the reputation. If you see what I'm getting at, devotion to the sort of virtue she's talking about is never separable from devotion to the human beings, because these are social virtues or virtues that help other humans. Yeah, that seems, that seems right, that there's, I mean, there's, the love of honor stuff really is slippery throughout that whole passage. Yeah.
Because when in human reproduction, you originally the notion is that you honor yourself in your offspring. So you love the thing in your offspring that you see that reminds you of yourself, right? Which I guess would be a good case for making sure that whoever you devote yourself, erotically to, to reproduce with it, you love them, right, for those principal qualities so that the dilution is somehow not as problematic, right? But then the, the erosaur or the honor gets sort of slips away from the beloved or the, the, the offspring, and it shifts on to yourself, what you want to be honored directly by others.
And so the point I make there is that at that point, you're trying to be the offspring, in effect, right, the thing being honored, where you risk becoming the offspring. And that might, that might have something to do with why virtue comes in there, because as you know, right, it's a social good. And therefore it's going to have some kind of, it's going to involve, sorry, I should say, the honor there is more broadly social or political, and therefore it's going to bring in, and virtue in oneself is going to be the question, right, rather than seeing oneself in another. I see.
So is this right then that the paradigmatic case of eros is eros of the beautiful, the paradigmatic case of eros of the beautiful is eros for a beautiful body. And the reason that's the paradigmatic case is because it is the fullest expression of the desire for personal immortality or to give the flip side the fullest indication that one finds the goods of this world to be insufficient. Is that is are those formulations good based on what we've just said? Sounds fair in a general sketch that seems about right.
Yeah. I mean, this is the concern with, with the desire for immortality, right, is letting go of these particular goods. And I mean, David is only nine and a half weeks into fatherhood, but they actually had more sacrifices than sleep and sort of cradling are down the road. But the loss of time studying Plato is something you will begin to feel very palpably, though there are obviously concrete goods and having children.
But certainly there are, it requires me considering those goods at the very least. And one thing Alex just implied I want to underline because I thought which I've said needs since, but someone hearing it for the first time could make it could end up with a very reductive view that love is just about personal immortality. And that's, I don't think something any of us are saying is a tremendous joy in being with another person in the right way, but there's a hope that comes with it. Yeah, I wonder whether it might be helpful to even more carefully at this formulation of I want the good for myself forever.
Because I find it sort of hard to know what I even mean by myself. And this isn't a merely theoretical concern because whenever, you know, like, if paternity is a good example of this, like, you know, people are reason about, oh, do I want to become a parent? And what they're really reasoning about is whether they know it or not is something like, do I want to become something really much different from what I am? And so this is, I think lots of, you know, even we can see at the beginning of the symposium, you have to hear people saying things like, well, you know, I used to think this was going to have been completely changed almost to be unrecognizable to myself.
And so I wonder whether there isn't always a kind of, in one of your sections going back, I think it might have been, gosh, you mentioned this problem about a loss of self versus, I'm just trying to find it, but in the case it strikes me that in any kind of radical, any radical situation such as the ones that we're talking about now, you really would have to lose yourself in order to keep it or it would be some new self or some unimaged himself or something like that. You wonder if this is part of the thing about being that shows up also in there, softness, sort of, you know, what do we, what do we, on the one hand, what are we even saying when we say we want the good, I want the good for myself forever because I don't know what myself means. Presumably if the good is good enough, am I changed to who I am on the one hand? And, you know, on the other hand, I think it's worth mentioning that this is not merely, as I said, but we're not merely theoretical thing and that lots of people undergo undertake this whole time, even religious conversion, people are like, you know, I'm just a new man.
Yeah, I mean, this is, it's complicated, but this is in a way like finding yourself through love is such a sort of common experience, right? And you see it with the sort of lovers of Socrates that populate the dialogue, but most powerfully, obviously, the one we encounter directly, Apologorus, right, who loves Socrates so much that everybody else is awful, including himself, right, way more transformative and defining than than it is for any other character, I think. But, you know, it's this. Aristodemus, of course.
Aristodemus to Agathon and yeah, I think the big question is what I played was here on erotic lover of Socrates, and I think I don't think you can go that far. I think it's something different is happening on that level. But in any case, to go back to the original thought, you know, you look at like the Republic and the I keep going down to the Republic because I'm teaching a semaphonic right now, but you go to the moral education and it's clear that the sort of vision of the perfect guardian speaks to Glaugan. And it speaks to something of himself that was always there, but which, you know, as he says, the countless others, right, like there's semiculus who talk in death could not speak to, and which therefore puts him in let ease with the sort of cynicism that they prevail in a way.
Eros is remarkably powerful and important and to go back to David's point, it comes with real joys, I think, when you find it precisely because it speaks to such a deep part of yourself. But again, in speaking so deeply, I think there is this risk that you lose. You lose the singularity of the experience means that you risk losing a sight, I think, on these sort of finitude of human life and the sort of finitude of good experiences. Which is, I guess, just to go back to the comment about coldness, which I think you were sort of obliquely touching on again, Michael, that on one hand, it's hard to sort of, it's hard not to be sober about these things when you're reading the symposium, you see the sort of mystical heights it goes to, right, if you're at all sort of cautious, you'll look at that.
On the other hand, you want to somehow maintain the charm amid this sobriety. It's very hard to do, right, it can easily be lost and turn into a kind of bitterness, right, but you sometimes see it in the dialogues. I can say, oh, sorry, go ahead. I would just say also, isn't it at least possible that these things are, that such a vision, which is, you know, whatever self-enilating, as well as sort of, I don't know, preserving or promoting it for real self, in some radical way, isn't it actually possible that such a thing could happen?
I mean, you wouldn't say that you knew for sure that it was impossible, like there may be like an even deeper level of coldness where you have to be sort of agnostic about whether such a thing could happen or not. The brutality you mean? Yeah, the whole vision and everything. I mean, you know, like whenever there's transcendence, whatever happens on the other side of it is with, at best, difficulty translated into the terms of the whatever, the free transcendent state, but it could very well be that, I mean, you know, people do change so radically on the basis of having some experience or some vision.
I mean, this is the sort of thing that actually happens to real people. They just change so deeply that it's as if they are in some sense, no longer the same person. I'm sure we all know people that are like that if we aren't those people ourselves. And, you know, maybe, you know, this could actually be something like this could really happen.
And this is where I would put, I would sort of advance this point though about, there's the question of transcendence. And then there's the question of your sort of reproduc- the things you reproduce or produce, trans-transcending. And that, I think, is the explicit claim that the team is trying to defend. It might be that in understanding the truth of things, to the degree that's possible, there is an immense satisfaction.
I think the communication of those truths raises distinct obstacles. And I think one example of this that we can sort of appreciate since we're 2,500 years after Plato is the difficulty of teaching these works. I find myself more and more introducing my seminars on Plato with Thucydides to give political and sort of context, to show these passions on not to historicize it or to conventionalize it, but to sort of give a sense of what's happening that Plato's drawing on. To say nothing, just having to explain the references, that the poem is the sort of names, all these things being lost.
And it seems to me that on some level of Plato, who probably more than anybody was able to speak to sort of the human or the truth of the human situation, or however you want to put it, and to the problems that sort of literalize, even his work is to some degree littered with particulars that get in the way of that universal, even as they elucidated. Now, I think Plato has tactics for short himself, all the guess of these things, right? He can draw on the political without it being essential to understanding some of his works. And so there's a, but nevertheless, there are certain obstacles, I think, always involved in this, in this work, that one has to tease out that have to do with the fact that whatever he's getting at, that's real, nevertheless has to be re-particularized.
And that's that I think is the fundamental or sort of insurmountable problem that the Ateem is the thesis he's trying, she's trying to defend that you can create immortal images of virtue or something like that, right? It's, there's always going to be, I think, a barrier, right? If it's going to find itself in a rather foreign time and place, as Plato does now. It's just reminding me of a detail and a very nice question you asked about what codris is doing in the list of legislators that, as mentioned, you point out that the Ateem is the chief of the Catholic National Nations, involves references to all the previous speakers, but codris seems gratuitous.
And this is one of these details that might be a barrier for a reader, you have to rush off and do some research. It seemed to me that it looked like codris, but somebody who took over responsibility for the Athenian regime from these years and his descendants, right? And so it looked like not only is this the difficulty of the particularization becomes harder and harder to the thing as time goes on, but also that there's a kind of competition between people who are erotic in the same way, where one can take over and commandeer the eternal regime of another. And so it seemed like just a very good example of the difficulty of understanding Plato, but also the difficulty of taking the Ateem as claims seriously.
Yeah, it's sort of like Lincoln speaking of a new birth of freedom, right? Like he had a baby with Publius or something like that. There's something strange about that or the way to lose actually as a comment about this about he calls interpretation buggery, producing monstrous offspring. It's very, it's something a Frenchman say.
But yeah, no, the codris bit, I don't know what to do with that exactly. I suspect, and this is sort of my suggestion in the book, that that might be a relic of one of the lost speeches, that somebody was speaking, not just about the laws as Pausanias does, but about law giving. Whether that's one of the unnamed speakers, or maybe it was in Aristodemus' speech and he excised him, we have no idea what happens with that. There's certain hypotheses that throw around, but that's my guess is that somebody spoke about Eros and law giving, but either it was Aristodemus or somebody else in Aristodemus, in order.
And that reason is an interesting question, which is either he's confused about Eros and law giving, and that's why he gets rid of the speech, or he's not interested in it, so he ignores it. But that's one of the mysteries I just, that I think about. I'll say this about Aristodemus, more and more as I try to understand his dialogue, everything seems to hinge on his motivations or his character. He seems to be one of the most perplexing figures in the whole dialogue, even though he's apparently negligible, and people seem to treat him as negligible and sort of laughable.
He strikes him as one of the most interesting characters, or sort of minor characters in the book. So I just want to make sure you're thinking the whole steam of law giving is some sort of hint at a missing speech? I wonder about it, I'm not sure. But you know, when you have these missing speeches, and Socrates is responding to everyone, and he doesn't know what's going to be missing later, it stands to reason that one would look out for elements in his speech that might have referred to law speeches.
And I wonder, now law has played an interesting role in Pazanias' speech. And you know, there is this suggestion that he might be engaged in a kind of subtle act of relogging, and perhaps that's what it is. But I wonder whether that's hint. It's one of the, it's, I think maybe the only place I can find a sort of big piece of the, or like a moment in the speech that just doesn't seem to fit with what came before.
So that's just a question I suppose. I see you could make it fit more so the initial claim about diamonds, right, is that they're responsible for all of the alleged communication from gods to human beings, or all the communication of humans to gods. Right. And so, and then with the law giving that passage culminates with temples being built to the law givers.
Right. And so it makes me suspect that this treatment of arrows has the theme of the psychological sources of religious belief in mind, which would make total sense if it's also supposed to be treating the hope for immortality. It's interesting. I'll have to think about that.
So Alex, your mention of the importance of a recidimist makes me think that maybe trying just to characterize in a way that we all like what Socrates is up to at Agathon that night would be interesting. I did like very much the suggestion that he's on what a poet, a comic poet hunting expedition, so maybe Agathon's going to turn out to be the human being that he needs, but it turns out not to be the case that he's going to be played out soon enough. You remark why he would permit a recidimist to go on that expedition and also why that expedition would have as maybe a side benefit or a side project the attempt to order the erotic inclinations of the other speakers so that they're all oriented somehow toward philosophy. I'm not sure I see what the Socratic motive would be there.
Why is he concerned with working on these other people in this way? Well, so let me try to offer a couple of thoughts on all those those pieces and how they might fit together. Well, one, Aristodemus, who imitates Socrates in appearance and then whom Socrates drops back, if less going. One of the questions I had is perhaps, he gets there, he's ushered right in, right?
Perhaps that's a sign for him of how much is Agathon interested in him. And then he obviously sees them trying to bring him in and Aristodemus protecting him. And so I wonder whether that was a sort of like a reconnaissance effort on his part. And I'll say this, the only two times we hear Socrates standing and not saying anything and falling silent is at the beginning of the symposium and later when else I said he did it in war.
So maybe it's a kind of tactic, right, in his sort of expedition here. And then when he gets in there, he starts teasing Agathon for his interest, right? Oh, the last thing just happens to be next to you. What are you hoping for?
Right? It's clear what he's he's toying around with him there. Now, the symposium, right, it culminates in the speech where he's integrating all of these saying you can all find satisfaction with him. But it's also primarily, I think, directed to Agathon, he's showing Agathon, the sort of power of philosophy that he can appeal to all these longings in a way that his can't, because what Socrates is able to do is make Agathon look like a fool at his own party.
He gets all this praise and Socrates quickly shows there's a huge problem in his speech. And then he shows how he can win sort of or create a vision that brings everybody together on some level, while also promising him the wisdom of Socrates and the fame of Homer. That's effectively what the speech promises to Agathon. So I think it all does kind of integrate into this thing.
Now, there was to Demas being there, I think indicates it has a kind of bigger problem, which is that he gets the word out. And there's every reason to think that Socrates' speech becoming public might have something to do with the sense that he doesn't believe in the gods of the city. I mean, he was just a minor god, but he has a god and he denies his divinity. And it could be shocking.
And it's now gone outside of the circle of Socratic's to these unnamed sort of money makers, right, who in just being called comrade, right, could be anyone, which is I think often a Plato uses this comrade means unidentified, unidentifiable, and therefore worrisome. It's gone outside of the names and the friendly, or at least the trusted, or known to the unknown. That's a problem. So I'm not sure how all these pieces should fit together, but it does suggest, at least on one level, the need for a kind of beautification of Socrates or or a sort of poetic representation of philosophy.
On this point, I would like to propose that it looks as if it's not just Plato who's doing that, but Socrates himself is doing this of himself, as to say, super seductive. That's part of the, you know, I really appreciate it. One of the main things I especially liked is about your book, Alex, was the way that you read that very thing that you just mentioned, namely, the appearance of, you know, the servants are all like, oh, there he is, grab him, you know, because they think it's Socrates because they got the double, right? And I thought that was really smart of you, I hadn't seen that before.
But then I thought, well, you know, there's a lot of seduction going on here, right? And so Socrates being like, oh, no, you know, send the double. Oh, he's here. Oh, he's not really here.
And then like, oh, not really, you know, he's here, but he's not really here. It's all very kind of dance of the seven bales you know, we have, and then at the level of the text as well, we have all of this, all of these, you know, kind of masks and sort of, you know, now you see it, now you don't, and do you really have it and slips away and all this other stuff. It's extremely, you know, and then all that, you know, whatever seductive kind of flirty body knowledge that's going on between Socrates and everybody else. And then, you know, also biodeys again, you know, he's saying, oh, he's got these hidden things and who wouldn't want to know these hidden pence right into the things.
And so it looks to me as if it's not only Toledo, but also Socrates who are both conspiring together to make Socrates into an incredible, you know, eromenon. And this does lead me to wonder what we're supposed to like, if, if, you know, Apollodorus and, you know, the folks who mimic him in overt ways are ridiculous, what is the right way to be the lover of Socrates, if any? What's the, how are we supposed to, if we get this whole array of people that ride a love him and look in one way or another ridiculous or like they're getting it by the wrong handle? What, what he's supposed is the right handle since clearly it's so it's designed to be so seductive.
So I'd be delighted to know your thoughts about that. Yeah, I mean, this, this is getting at the relationship, I think between Socrates and Plato, which again, has a take to call love, but there is a kind of relationship there to Socrates and I mean, the book starts with Apollodorus spilling all the beans, right? And Aristodemus, a bit more cautious circling among apparently, stochratics only, to Socrates at a private party sharing his thoughts with a sort of select few. But then we hear in Elsobody's speech, he gets drunk and sort of spills the beans about, you know, a very intimate moment with Socrates underneath a blanket, if not underneath, also underneath his cloak, if not showing himself completely nude.
I suspect he did and he got even Elsobody's going to go that that far in his drunkenness. But the dialogue ends with an argument that Socrates is having just with Erstofen is an Agathon and which Aristodemus, because he's not like Socrates, gets too drunk and passes out and then wakes up in his fog only captures like the thesis and not the argument to being advanced to defendant, can't have, but which Plato obviously has because if anybody sort of puts together tragedy and comedy and does so really effectively in the supposing, I think, where all these allusions to the death of Socrates and all this sort of playful stuff, he declines to put it in writing. He keeps it as a secret, I think he makes intimations about what he means, but he keeps it as a secret between him and Socrates. And so he's not one of these lovers like Apollodorus, you know, who never shuts up about his girlfriend, he's kind of a guy.
But he's a sort of respectful lover, you could say he's just a friend with an inside joke and a sort of inside conversation, which he'll represent and offer some insight into, but which he's not so crassist to divulge, that kind of relationship, whatever it might be in the end, I think is, if not an erotic love of Socrates, it is a proper relationship, at least it escapes many of the pitfalls of the others. Well, in particular, do you think that there's an idea that we should or should not, when, you know, Apollodorus, when Socrates says to Apollodorus, hey, why don't you come to the party or is it says, why don't you come to the party? He says, he responds, oh, I'll do whatever you say. That's quite striking.
And, you know, could be read in an erotic way or one in various different ways, but it looks like, and then, you know, there's an immigrant of Socrates, it says, but sure seems like, I don't know, when I read Socrates, I kind of want to know what parts of this should I mimic. I mean, you know, he is well, and what Socrates says after this is after he says, oh, I'll do whatever you say, Socrates says, follow me. And so I guess another way of putting the same question is to ask what does follow me mean? The team also uses the word follow, but she says you might not be able to follow me.
And so I'm sort of interested in what you think I hear, what counts as a good way of following Socrates, if any. Yeah, Aristodemus is an interesting example, because he's a kind of crude version of what is in a way a sort of a kind of acceptable way of relating to Socrates. He's not so sort of temperamental as Apollodorus. He wants to ape him.
And so one thing I came to understand leading up to write in this book is that I tend to think of Aristodemus and Apollodorus as foils. One loves Socrates and therefore hates everyone else. The other and so he seems to sort of embody this sort of I love this transcendent thing that human beings can't approach right and so like a differentiation of the beloved. Whereas Aristodemus appears at least at first glance to take no Socrates as a model, I'll follow it.
But the problem is he can only follow these external characteristics. Now from the side of creating a sort of poetic version of Socrates that can give him greater sort of currency or longer currency, he's incredibly helpful to think about Aristodemus and I think it's something that Plato certainly exploits. But in the end, I wonder whether he doesn't have the same motive as Apollodorus or whether he doesn't. He's not also guilty of divinizing something and implicitly engaging in a kind of self-hatred.
It's not as obvious but he's he can't drink like Socrates, he can't stay up late, he can't think and argue like Socrates. And this might be it might be that he gave a speech right? But got rid of it and that would be if that possibility is true and I don't know if we can decide if that possibility is true, I think it would suggest that he has a kind of self-hatred. That's strictly speaking not maybe healthy for himself but perhaps a good understanding of how a poet might take advantage of these passions and give Socrates or what philosophy is sort of all right, that Plato takes advantage of making Socrates beautiful.
Well I agree that it's easy to like you know I agree that these people are foils in the way that you said but the question for me is okay well great what's the right way what's the good way I mean if Socrates is in any sense a teacher then you know if you follow a teacher to use that word again then you are in some way evdic whatever erasing yourself which in many cases is appropriate right? So this does get back to this question of like a radical personal transformation but in any case what's the right way of you know admiring Socrates or living Socrates if is there any guidance there seems to be lots of wrong ways to do it but is there any guidance about the right way? I mean it would have to be something like Plato's respectful disagreements with Socrates or friendly disagreements with Socrates about writing about his death apparently you know at least the young Plato wanted to get him to avoid his death. What he ultimately thought about that is very very difficult but obviously the mode in which they they conducted themselves philosophically differs in some way whether that's by creature of circumstance Socrates is dead now something needs to be done to preserve him and therefore writing has a legitimacy it didn't have before you know the hero Socrates needs his poet I think there's tons of illusions to this right and they need to create an enduring sort of model of it there are all these after Socrates death of all these socratic groups popping up at the beginning of the Parmenides that the Atetus the Fido their sort of unwilling sort of distortions of Socrates are unconscious and so maybe Plato thought he had to preserve that but that would be something like the model I don't know the answer to these these questions but I think you would have to start working on that issue of Plato versus Socrates if it's ultimately versus or what level it is that sort of opposition.
It also seemed to me that you had an interestingly nuanced account of Elsabite's character and in particular one that doesn't accept that Elsabite is a failed educational experiment on Socrates part or not simply a failure one of the things you mentioned is in Elsabite's speech he says he doesn't want to grow old sitting beside Socrates and I wondered whether that wasn't there was wasn't something appropriate about that maybe Xenophon would be another example of being a big one of gold sitting beside Socrates and there's a you make a cryptic reference to the quite upon at one point right which is this unanswered criticism of Socrates that basically a legislative Socrates knows how to make you aware of your neediness but not how to help you satisfy right that also would suggest that association with Socrates the correct association is somehow transitional right he he puts you on he makes you aware of the needs to attend your own concern for the good but then that's up to you subsequently. Yeah I mean your mention of Xenophon is is appropriate I found myself while working on this book wanting more and more to read Xenophon and I was of course just you know think about the memorabilia but above all I was filled with erotic longing for the analysis and I'll just do a plug for your very interesting episodes on the analysis right for combat and classics I mean but that was definitely it's risen up on my list of things I need urgently to think about for that very reason that there's this sort of appreciation and decision to leave a different kind of life than what Socrates suggests and wanting to understand Xenophon's grounds for that decision and whether he was ultimately happy with that decision I mean that's a fascinating question and you're absolutely right to raise. Lewis is back and he's the fun's over. I'm back all good things must come to an end we're told.
You know really this has been an outstanding conversation I want to thank all the participants tonight Alex, Jeff, David, and Michael it's really been great everyone should read Musings on Plato's Symposium and our thanks again to Alex for writing it and and I think Alex do you want to say anything by way of signing out? I mean thanks to all of you for reading it I mean like I said would you really want to offer readers and as I was given some of the questions ahead of time listening to the questions here this is exactly the sort of thing I was hopeful for and can ask for better interlockers so thank you really appreciate your time and Lewis of course to yours as well and for publishing it and for your guidance I really appreciate it. Alright thanks to everyone and good night all.