Welcome back to the New Thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always. This is my good friend Alex. How are you doing, Alex?
I'm doing well, maybe almost here. Almost here, man, in about a week or two, maybe a month who knows, the Lord always pranks me. He pranks me with my daughter and she arrives six weeks early. I think the Lord pranks your daughter with you.
Yeah, that's true. That's better phrased. And what about one of the Lord's great pranks on humanity, Greg McBrayer. How are you doing, Greg?
I'm doing great, guys. I'm listening about our music. I really enjoy that. I love it too.
I love it too, but one of the reasons I like it so much is it's so incongruous. It's just like this highfalutin and then it's David making fart noises or date line NBC, like how to catch a predator noises. It just reminds me of that old SNL sketch tells a riddle dream. John Levitz, I love that sketch where he was just like eavesdrop on people doing risque things.
He was very funny. He was dangerous. Yeah, it was a sexual innuendo, but then when he came to actual sex, he was horrified. He was just like an innuendo.
He only liked the innuendo. John Levitz only likes innuendo. Anyway. Okay, so speaking of sex today and part of our never ending series, nice segue.
Plato's symposium, we're doing the speeches by Socrates. We're going to do this in two episodes. So this is the first and we're going to keep this episode to 20 minutes. The following episodes of 15, I'm kidding.
These will be full-length episodes. I've lobbied to get them down, but I think people are really enjoying the series. And in fact, all jokes aside, it is nice to kind of complete a serious work slowly. And hopefully the listeners can return to these episodes individually and you know, during the semester, if they're reading or if they're just reading outside of school.
So, you know, we'll get three or four more left or seven left. I can't remember. Yeah. And then what's the next book length?
Can we tease some of this? We'll keep you early on. I'll do it. I don't know.
Let me do it. A series, one episode per chapter of the Spirit of the Laws. So that'll take you through the year 2052. Yeah.
That's the joke. That was his joke. But seriously, what would we do? What would we do?
Seriously, what are we doing? Yeah, yeah. More Plato, I think. Listen to us, why don't you let us know?
Yeah, we want to do it. We do want to do the entirety of Plato and the entirety of Shakespeare. Right. I think we can do both of those things.
I don't know how you get through a book like The Lost. We can have Tom Cleveland to explain it. So okay, so let's get off Socrates. Sure.
Maybe what we should do is just bring us up to speed just in case listeners aren't listening to these in order. The last episode was on Agathon. So I'll just kind of do a real quick summary of the entire symposium up to this point. So basically the symposium is a dialogue.
Symposium means drinking party. Just to catch us back up. It's a story being told second-hand for the second time several years later, a decade or more after the party has happened. This guy named Apollodorus is relating the story to an unnamed comrade.
When we get into the narrative frame, basically as a drinking party, Eric Simicus and some others have insisted that it be a little more intellectual, a little more convivial. I guess I shouldn't have said convivial actually, but it's a less convivial effect than before when they had a bunch to drink. So instead of just getting sauced, they thought maybe we would have tikturans having speeches in praise of arrows, of course, being the Greek God of love. At this point in the New Thing Street by the symposium, we've heard the first five speakers give speeches on behalf of love.
And it's probably worth pointing out that there have been other speeches, but they weren't recounted to us. We don't have those speeches. So the first speech we have is by Phaedrus. He's a young man.
He gives a speech on behalf of love. And it's arrows is the oldest of gods. And it's sort of he seems to tie arrows to the things that they can get free. So that people will be willing to die for you in these kinds of things.
Next, we get Pausanias, who gives a speech on behalf of love. He says that there are two arrows or arrow-tays. I guess I should mention that Pausanias is actually in love with Agathon, the host of the party. Next, we get a doctor.
So we get a sort of scientific or medical treatment of the phenomenon of love. He agrees that arrows is a god. He agrees that there are two. He agrees with Pausanias.
And he's in love with someone, Phaedrus, our first speaker. So the first speaker is the object of Eric Simikis' love. Pausanias is in love with Agathon. Eric Simikis is in love with Phaedrus.
So we have a real party where there's a lot of different romantic connections going on. The fourth speech and the one that we spend a considerable amount of time on, because I happen to find it very beautiful. And I think you guys agreed. Is by Rocco Sefredius.
I don't know what that name means, but I'm going to have a feeling that I'm going to have to feel it. And I'm not going to be happy with what happens when I do J. The candidate. Please do Google it.
Some of my students listen to this. I'm trying to grow up. I'm trying to grow up. Alex and David just for this one.
Go on. The fourth speech is given by the ancient Greek comic poet, Aristophanes. I think his account of love is closest to the phenomenon as most people understand it. Because he's the sort of the love of cheese.
It's true. That joke wasn't very good. And then the next one is Agathon. Agathon is a tragedy.
I wish you could see their faces right now. Nobody's happy when I'm, you guys see how it feels? You don't like the jokes I make? I don't like the jokes you make.
That's exactly right. Agathon, the tragic playwright, Red is House. He's just one. I've been saying the Emmys or the Oscars or whatever.
And so he's given an over the top speech praising eros of the highest eros of God. But his previous speakers are wrong. He's not two. There's one eros.
And he's the youngest God. He's beloved by Pausanias. Agathon is speech meets with an enormous amount of enthusiasm. People are extremely happy.
There's a sort of rush that comes over the crowd, a little small crowd when he's done speaking. And next up is Socrates's speech. So the table has been set in the following way. The most immediately preceding speaker was Agathon who gives a rousing account of love that arouses all of the men there, many of them are there with their lover or beloved.
So that's kind of where things stand. I have a quick question. I have a quick answer. Yeah, you probably do actually with this.
Quick on the draw. Yeah, I don't know the platonic dialogues like you guys do. But of the dialogues in which Socrates plays a role, is this his latest entrance into a dialogue? Well, I mean, he was there was the earlier conversation when he sits down right with that guy, and then before that conversation, which, but I mean, here's an answer to the question.
This strikes me as the least dialogic of the dialogues, maybe the apologies of Socrates. But so you're right that what happens is not Socrates conversing with people. You get a series of independent speakers and then Socrates speaks. And I think we'll get into this in a little bit.
But Socrates tries to turn his speech into a dialogue and sort of surreptitiously in various ways. But yeah, you're right. I mean, he comes late to the game. He's one among many.
He doesn't play the dominant role that he seems to play on a lot of the other dialogues. I think that's exactly right. Do you want anything to announce? Yeah, and it gets increasingly dialogic.
Right. I mean, literally he tries to like engage. Where Agathon Speech doesn't try to engage with Agathon. I think he's trying to do the algorithm.
He's shut down. Yeah, I have to stick to it. And so the first thing he does when he comes in, he sort of threatens to say, Hey, look, this is not what I signed up for. This speech was crazy.
I want to. This is how I speak. Let me speak my way. And this is the way we're going to speak.
And I can also examine Agathon where I'm leaving them, you know, Socrates is always interesting to them. They agreed to his terms. But I think my point was that he tried to do that already once before Agathon speech. Okay.
Okay. He's trying to secure what was denied him earlier. Right. Right.
Right. So he's making, he's made multiple attempts to turn this series of independent speeches into a dialogue and failed. Seemingly failed at every turn. But even his speech that he does give us is basically an acted out dialogue.
So what's funny is that then he finally talks to Agathon and I think Agathon kind of lets him down his responses. He's like, you don't forget it. I'll just make up my own dialogue with this lady, Ditima. So yes, ultimately just making a conversation of himself with himself.
Yeah. A version of himself that resembles Agathon, but it's not identical to him. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. So should I guess I'm next on the run show, right? We're going to talk about how he tries to change the procedure. Yeah, I guess we're kind of talking about that a little bit.
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So lift up your clock as it were. I just threw back my hoodie for the listeners.
It's going to make visual jokes on a podcast. But at 198A, look at that beautiful dome. I know it's giant kind of Lord. I know I do it with a Roman.
I see at least two arrow taste right now. Getting a rotate. So 198A, Socrates comes in and he claims to have spoken prophetically in saying that Agathon was speaking more blissfully and that he would be at a loss. It's interesting that he portrays his sort of sensible prediction as a prophecy and I don't know what to do with all these details.
It's sort of interesting. But then when he jumps into his account, he's really talking about what it means to eulogize or incommiate a anything at all. Right? The way he puts it, this is that 198C for those of you who are using the better dirty translation as always.
When he said 98C, he remarks that Agathon is spoken in a kind of away reminiscent of Gorgias, this rhetorician, this famous rhetorician. He says, I am to be laughed at for having agreed to eulogize arrows in turn with you and for claiming that I was skilled in erotic, where it's turned out, I know nothing of the matter, nor how one is to eulogize energy and anything. For him, I stupidly believe the truth had to be told about anything that was given to eulogy and that this was the underpinning and that and this is the crucial part here by selecting the most beautiful parts of the truth, when was to arrange them in the seamless manner possible. Now, this is how he's going to go on to speak.
So we should clarify two things here that we have to do to understand the full truth. One, he's selecting only the most beautiful truths. Anything that is not beautiful or even ugly about arrows, he will not say. Second, he'll also arrange those truths so that they are put in the most seemingly manner, which is to say that if you change the order of the speech, it might look quite different.
I bring this up because I think there's basically when we get to the actual account of arrows after a sakry, which is really going to be in our next episode. I think what we'll see is that one, he leaves certain things out while pointing that there's something more that needs to be said, and two, he's put the two speeches or the two parts of the speech in such a way that I think is going to allow arrows to look more beautiful. That it might have been the other way round. That's all just anticipatory to set up.
Just to note that what you're getting about arrows is not the whole unvarnished truth, but it's a half truth and a half truth deceptively or somewhat distortively organized. Greg, you seem like you want to jump in here. No, no, I mean, that was one of the things I want to make sure that we got that he leaves out the ugly truth and you said it's happened, you know some shows, we're probably saying the beautiful things are true. I can imagine a eulogy for one of us, for example, being if you're only limited to the beautiful things are true being very brief.
very brief. Once I'm up with one point before I move on from this and you touched on it, so I thought it's worth revisiting something I was thinking. The lichens, Socrates lichens Agathon to Gorgias. I've always struggled trying to make sense of that.
There's another passage a little later and I've struggled making sense of it too. I wonder if the making that analogy is implying that Agathon's poetry is in some way akin to Gorgias as rhetoric. Or is it to even be a little more general? Is it that rhetoric and poetry are similar modes of inquiring, communicating, they're less concerned with the truth, more concerned with the effect they have on the audience, if that makes sense.
In Arizona, well, even in a variety of ways we talked about, there's science, there's dialectics, then there's poetry, then there's rhetoric in the poetry. I think Agathon would acknowledge that. A good part of the speech was how beneficial heros is. But the stuff we were talking about is how powerful poetry is, so persuade people and keep people together.
I want to point out two other things. One thing we could say is, he wants to eulogize it this way, but why? There are two statements here that I think are worth looking at it. 198 B to C, or B rather, reflecting on Agathon Sreech Sakhry says, I, for my part, on reflecting that I myself should be unable to say anything nearly as beautiful almost ran off and was gone in shame.
So he'd be ashamed in a way to speak so beautifully. And he reiterates this in slightly different form at 199 A, he says, I am not a eulogist in this fashion, I am simply incapable of it. So he eulogizes in the way he does, because of a lack of capacity on his part to say beautiful falsehoods. And I think there's some deeper inclination or some deeper part of Sakhry's that's forcing him to speak the way he does.
Greg? I touch on what I think what I suspect, part of the thing that he's unwilling or unable to do. I suspect this is right at 199 A. It seems as though Agathon has identified the beautiful and the good in a way that Socrates would find problematic, if that makes sense.
So the over the top praise of arrows seems to mitigate that tension between the beautiful and the good. And this goes way back to our first conversation about this when Socrates was going to Agathon's house. He said two things, I noted there, the good, good to the house with the good uninvited and beautiful, I go to a beauty implying that Agathon is somehow trying to put the good and the beautiful together. And this is somehow akin to putting shoes on Socrates and making him take a bath.
There's a living to how beautiful he can make the good, but also how good the beautiful Agathon can actually be in a way, Socrates speech, as I read it, is the best you can do to reconcile the beautiful and the good. And that requires saying all the beautiful things about arrows, but none of the things that might be not beautiful, yet perhaps still good or true at least. Why does Socrates wait until this point? Why does he follow the rules if people have been getting things badly wrong prior, like in their speechifying prior to this point?
It would be, you know, it's like when you're getting your hungover, because they're still drinking a little bit, nobody really follows the rules. Socrates could just butt in and say, wait a second, you've gone badly, astray, let me correct you. Why do you suspect he holds his piece? I'm not sure he does follow the rules, right?
I mean, what we get right here, I'll let you, maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying, but what he does right here is instead of jumping right into a speech, which is what just about everybody else has done, he sort of says, well, you know, I'm not really, gosh, Agathon speech was problematic in a falling way. And I didn't understand it twice. I didn't, I thought we were just saying what was true and beautiful, not just all the beautiful things that came to our mind. And then, next he's going to turn to, so this is just sort of the general pontificate about Agathon speech.
And then next he's going to turn to refute Agathon and show Agathon that his account was wrong before launching into his own speech. So I mean, you're right, I guess he does eventually follow the order he does what he's supposed to do. But at least initially, it's, it's, I mentioned a moment ago, it's trying to engage these guys in dialogue in some way. What do you mean that he doesn't just simply dress them down in the way that he would do another dialogue?
Why does he wait until this point to jump in? So why did he do it with the other thinkers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, very good.
Yeah. Well, I suspect the reason he's doing it now is just it's becoming more, it's becoming more pressing. Like the first time he did it was one speaker away, right before Agathon, the guy next to him is about to speak. So now that it's his turn, so I think as it's been becoming his turn, he's becoming more parent than I think by the way, the show's reluctant on his part to give a speech and on behalf of arrows.
And I think he's becoming more aware that it's actually going to be his turn and he's reluctant to say it. I'll just point out, so that's a great question, David. And why his wife, I think, you know, Xenophon's symposium can be helpful here, because I think there you see a Socrates who multiple times almost explicitly rejects the opportunity to engage in philosophical conversation with people. And I think one of the reasons in Xenophon's symposium is it's actually just thinks this isn't the time or place.
Like, you know, people are here. The weird thing is that Socrates and almost all of the dialogue seems to be single-mindedly about trying to find the truth and doesn't really matter. And I'm just going to tear people down and figure things out. Here, you just like in Xenophon's symposium, maybe it's just, you know, he got dressed up, which is unusual for him.
He went to this party where it's like, you know what, I don't, there's some smart people. I'll just kind of listen. And maybe only gets drawn into sort of philosophic conversation reluctantly. These aren't the people with whom, maybe our stuff, and he's just died.
These aren't the people with whom we want to have genuine conversation. This is related to something I've said in a few papers I've written. Sorry, we're going too far afield, but usually in the place I'm in dialogue, you see, he's speaking with someone who's clearly his inferior or clearly his superior. And here, he seems to be speaking principally to people who are in the manner of speaking his peers.
And so I don't think he's not trying to learn from them. They're not like the wise, like potentially like a premedities or a protagonist on one hand. On the other hand, it's not a young kid that he's trying to lure into teach like Alcibiades or Theodges or something like this. And so I think here it's like, look, I'm just, I mean, even if this is sort of weird to think about, but if he has a philosopher, like even if the philosopher just goes and hangs out of the party, I suppose, if that makes sense.
I don't know, maybe that's wrong. Yeah, I think that's good. But I would answer that he's with his peers, but let's be honest. Of course, of course.
He just posentiest or not his peers. No, I think he would write something about their moan is level. So I don't know why he would check to correct us. And he has no no no.
No, you're a child molestation is not no both deeply gross and weird. Right. What's he got to game with that? But Agathon, we know from the very beginning is attracted to Socrates wisdom.
He saves the seat almost obsessively to get him there. Right. In addition, when they when they decided what to speak about there were two resolutions made, one was what are they going to do? And everybody decided without asking Socrates, we're going to have speeches.
Then and then they said, well, what are we going to speak to? And I said, oh, we got to talk about he was completely on board with that. Right. And so in a way, he's he's allowed them to have their part and now that he has his chance to speak and he's last to speak, he's going to say, well, okay, I want to speak about arrows, but we're not going to do it the way that you guys determine it without consulting me.
I'm going to use the fact that everybody wants to hear what I say, especially Agathon, to speak in the way that I want to speak. So I can go. He greatly exploits their desire to hear him speak to turn to be able to do it in the matter that he wants to do it. No question.
Yeah. And this is one of the few dialogues, I see very few actually, where there is an obvious active real concern on behalf of at least one interlocutor to have Socrates wisdom, where he's really got got a fish on the hook. And you're saying yeah, Agathon, the other dialogue I have in mind is one that's closely related, which is the Fido where all these people are concerned that with Socrates death so to dies philosophy. And I think it's for that reason that Socrates gives an account of how he became who he is, right?
This is how I became the person that you want to be. Can we skip down to the runner show for a second? So it's funny you mentioned that because the other dialogue I thought of here was a protagonist because here Socrates says, look, I just want to quit and not speak and they sort of tells them to beg him to come back, which is what exactly what is the protagonist. So this is a pretty common trope of him to do the person like he doesn't want to talk.
Oh, no, I'm just going to stop. No, no, please Socrates. Well, okay, fine. But since you brought up the biological biological biographical bit, can you just speak some more about that Alex?
Yeah, so there are three accounts of the young Socrates in Plato's dialogues. There's the apology of Socrates, but this is obviously later his biography. This is after he's become wise in some sense. These three accounts are in the Fido, the symposium and the Parmenis.
They're also the only platonic dialogues that are communicated at least verbally by somebody else, right? Other than Socrates. Fido obviously has to be honest other than Socrates because he's dead. Now, two of them are really closely related in my mind, which are the Fido and the symposium.
The Parmenis is the only kind of young Socrates that is not filtered on some level through Socrates, which is to say in the Fido, Socrates tells some people about his upbringing and they then communicated on to a cecretase. The guy who hears it from Fido. In the symposium, Socrates tells a bunch of people about how he learned about arrows. They then pass it along through the characters.
The Parmenides, we just hear from this Puthadorus. It was at his house. He hears the conversation, communicates it to Plato's half brother and forgetting his name right now. And then they communicate to this guy, Cappellus and his friends.
Okay, so that I think puts the Fido and symposium closer together. They're related in a lot of ways. Once about death and once about love. In the Fido, the answer to our mortality is the immortality of the soul.
That's the sensible answer. And the way to get to that is philosophy. In symposium, the way to deal with our death is to reproduce in some literal or metaphoric way. And so there's both are concerned with the same problem, but a very different otherworldly versus this worldly solution.
The gods are central to both of those too. Yeah, the Fido takes place all day to symposium, takes place all night. In the Fido's philosophy is dying and being dead by which he says he means an eros or love for awfulness or prudence. And in fact, a lot of language repeats.
So there's just a number of ways in which they're deeply related that points to a kind of intimacy between other themes. Some people put these accounts together serially. I don't think they belong serially. I don't really understand how one can see the three dialogues as falling on one another.
But that is in a way sort of observation about how they kind of fit together. I think the premedities, I mean, obviously, what a whole book on this, I think the premedities is the actual account of Socrates turn the other two are ironically tailored to suit the audiences or to meet the expectations of the audience. So, sorry, this is going on in length, but this will get us back to it. In the Fido, Socrates says, Oh, well, philosophy is a kind of art of speeches.
And this is how I arrived at it. And I'm going to tell you what it is. And you can go run off with it, right? So it's abstracted in that way.
And therefore, they don't need to be worried that he's dying. Agathon is just one of prize for the people. And he is filled with this sort of a self love that shows that he's beautiful and good. And Socrates says, well, if you want to be both beautiful and good, the way to that is philosophy.
And he creates an account of philosophy that really suits somebody like that. I feel like this is an episode of tangents. But I think for those words, I know David doesn't like these, but we've gone off script a good bit here. But man, I feel like someone's really good stuff.
I love David's questions usually take us on good tangents, I would say, usually, usually. I had a naughty question and I can't answer it. I would do it whether Socrates went to the symposium looking for sex. But you know, that's not in the text.
It's just a question I had. What do you think about sex with also bodies? Also bodies wasn't there. Yeah, yeah.
But I thought that I thought the symposium was somehow tied to antibodies. He comes in later. Yeah. He wasn't fighting.
He can't go looking for the guy that wasn't invited and comes in late. All right. Yeah. But maybe he's not bad.
This is about Agathon, right? He asked as a woman and engaged in sodomy so he could write women better in his place. He said that. At least so, yeah.
That's how we should collaborate. That's how we should calamiate our or just not. This is just serious. Yeah, well, he said something.
No real philosophy for people. People are actually examining lives looking for sex ever. No real philosophy would do that. He's just contemplating the eternal peace.
Oh, is that what that letter of Machi Valley that you sent to me today? Yeah. We don't sex each other. We send each other.
We send each other. It's not really great. Come on. I don't know what you're talking about.
Your password is hurting this. I don't know what you're talking about. Okay. You can Google it.
I'll tell you this. I'll folks. I don't know. Be careful next time you go to the cleaners.
All right. Next, I'll just move along on the show. So, as I mentioned, we're going to do a lot with we're going to do two episodes on this talk or speech. But we haven't even gotten into the speech yet because there's sort of two parts that take place before we get into the speech proper.
The first is this sort of rebuke of Agathons manner of eulogizing that Alex just went through nicely. And then we get a direct refutation of Agathon. And then after he's refuted Agathon, Stockty's began giving his speech. And I'll just point out, maybe I'll also point this out again in the next episode, that basically Stockty's goes through and shows the insufficiencies in each of the previous speeches.
He begins with Agathon, then he goes to Aristophanes, I think because they're the two most actually, Aristophanes is most seriously not necessarily Agathons. And then he goes through Phaedrus Pausanias, Eric Simikus, maybe not in that order, but it's Agathon and Aristophanes in any event. So, we've gone through his rebuke of Agathon for being sort of over the top and saying anything good and beautiful, that came to mind. What he does now is he turns to refute him.
The beginning of the refutations at 199c. And here, I guess one of the things that Agathon had said was that Eros is the most beautiful to God. And we actually dwelled on that at some length in the previous episode. And what follows in the refutation is Socrates proves to Agathon, or he at least gets Agathon to concede that Eros is not beautiful.
Therefore, he's shown that Agathon's argument, or at least UOG is inconsistent, doesn't grasp the phenomenon accurately. So, at the very beginning of the reputation at 199c, I have that Eros is the phonospade right, 199c. Yes, one is right. He says, look, Agathon, is love of something or not of something.
And Agathon says, well, of course, it's of something. And then sorry, he says, I don't mean it's a mother or a father, that would be laughable in Cess joke here. And Agathon says, of course, it's of something. And then Socrates goes through this argument.
I don't know how much we have to read of it. But he says, look, no one desires what they have. And so, if Eros is beautiful, it wouldn't, actually, if Eros is love of the beautiful, then it wouldn't be beautiful. Now, I'm going to try and go through the argument a little more clearly here in just moment.
But I'll do it in quick summary again, and then try to go through a little more thoroughly. If love is of the beautiful, love cannot be beautiful, because you can't love what you have. That's the argument. So, I mean, if I want to be tall, it's because I'm not tall.
If I want to have hair, it's because I'm bald. If I want to have money, it's because I'm poor. And so, all of these... And you don't want examples because you have like a million of them.
I've got a lot of examples. You don't want cheese. So, the point is love is for something that you don't have. And so, then, Socrates says something kind of interesting.
I think this is a 200D. So, what happens if you do run into a tall man who says he wants to be tall? Socrates says, here's how you explain that. What they actually want is to continue to be tall in the future.
So, when someone says, like, if a rich person says, I want to be rich, you can say, we already rich. And so, what do they mean when they say that? What they're really saying is that they want to continue to be rich into the future. So, I'll read Socrates' account of this person.
And then, I'll point out to something that I think is implicit in what he's saying. This is right at 200D. Socrates says, you human being possessing wealth, health, and strength, want to possess them also in the future. Since at the present moment, at least, whether you want to or not, you have them.
Consider then, whenever you say, I want the present things, if you mean anything else than, I want the things at the present moment to be present also in future time, would he agree to that? Aristodemus said that Agathon consented. Now, the missing part there, I think, is that, and Socrates will tease this out later, is that the person who says that I think implicitly wants to possess that thing in the future indefinitely. Maybe state that a little more starkly, a little more clearly.
They want to possess it forever. I want to possess wealth forever. I want to be tall forever. I want to be beautiful forever.
I want eternal or everlasting beauty. And so, if this eternal, everlasting element, that's extremely important. So, then later, he gets back to Eros, and he says to Agathon, so see, so Eros can't be beautiful if it longs for the beautiful. And Agathon says, of necessity, this is a 201B.
So, Agathon agrees. Who knows how Tyre is this either. But my problem with that is Agathon could have said, why couldn't Agathon have said two Socrates? Well, hold on, maybe Eros is beautiful.
And if Eros loves the beautiful, it's because Eros wants to continue to possess beauty indefinitely, just like the tall person, the wealthy person who wants to possess it forever. I guess what my point is that I'm not sure that Agathon, even though he's been defeated, if the defeat is justified or warranted. In other words, Eros could be beautiful temporarily, but want beauty and want to remain beautiful in the future. That's one alternative.
But the other alternative, of course, is that if it's so passionately devoted to the beautiful, it's not beautiful. Agathon conceits this. And Saki says, and yet, even though you still spoke beautifully, even though you said something that wasn't true, you guys should jump in if you want. But I do think that there's at least Agathon had one quiver that he could have pulled out.
How do you want it to? Another quiver, I think, would be to say, a tall person can still desire to be taller, strong person, stronger. It's all a beautiful person, even more beautiful. Now, that only blunts Socrates' point, right?
Because it still would be true that a beautiful person, insofar as they loved something or somewhat beautiful, would in some respect or to some degree be ugly, they'd be imperfect in some way. Right, right, that's exactly right. So, when you apply it, even if Eros is extremely beautiful, it's imperfectly beautiful. Yeah, and it would also imply that Agathon, for some reason, is uninclined to accept an account of beauty in terms of degrees, which I think would have something to do with the fact that he just seems so hot in himself.
He is just great. But for that reason, can't make sense of his own love of Socrates or inclination of Socrates. Yeah, I absolutely wonder to what extent this will touch on the theology that Socrates is about to give, that we might not accept an account of beautiful gods if their beauty is imperfect, that we sort of demand perfectly beautiful gods or gods. Can we go back to the love of the mother and the love of the father?
Naturally. You mean a naturally for you? You mentioned about a lovely show and I was wondering what you had to say about that because you put in the run show and then you passed over it so quickly. I was like, well, Greg puts incest in the run show, I bet he's got some juicy anecdote for this.
But I got nothing. He also had in parentheses, childhood, comma, George, and David is laughing himself silly right now. I'm sorry. Listen, not all southerners.
You're right. My parents are decent people. Can I put in a lesson? So every every Strauss and I talk to see this as an incest.
I'm like, take it easy guys. But they always jump to that. But one of the things I find interesting here is there's a non incest way to take this point as a subtle reference, which is that he's about to give an account of arrows as necessary culminating in something like birth in the beautiful, which would mean that if you love a woman or a man, you love them as mother or as father, right? As somebody who can generate with you.
So this ridiculous laughable point would actually be quite true. If you're in love, which I take to be a really, I think this is actually a really relevant point as we were so. It's about to have a child. Yeah.
We're so crazy about this idea of romantic love and your spouse being your best friend, the person you want to just hang out with for the rest of your life. And it's really what you really want. What do you want, Alex? Tell us what you really want.
If you want to acknowledge your own quality, it's not the two of you together. It's to reproduce with your son as mother and father. Yeah, no jokes aside when I was dating again, I actually remember thinking myself consciously like, Oh, well, maybe you should be asking, would this woman be a good mother? Just sort of strange thing to ask.
It was strange to me because I've been raised in the watch in the DC where David Barr still lives. Oh, dude, you can't I mean, I remember Greg, we would talk about this. Oh, no. I won't go too deeply into it, but it's fine.
We would have to bathe guy was single at the time. I care. I can't get a single life was, are you my other half? My other half.
No, we would say, well, maybe, you know, it'd be nice to have a girlfriend that reads in each. Yeah. And I would think about it. I know that I'm in each other.
Good heavens, man. You don't want to just offended our half of our audience. I don't know what I mean. I don't mean thoughtful people, no, I completely agree.
I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, that cuts both ways to it cuts for me. I could be a woman making this argument about a male counterpart. No, one of my good friends, I read to each other. Like one of my good friends.
You know, I was surprised that he didn't have an interest in another intellectual. And he said, look at the end of the day, you want domestic bliss and you want what that means is you want domestic respite. You don't want, you don't want to come home and hash out Plato anymore again. I mean, yeah, you have those great styles, they love stories, it was obviously so many of them, but that's a real blessing.
Yeah. So the law corns, you ever watched read that cartoon strip? No, yeah, it's not like Andy Cap, the same general genre. They're just the guy just gets drunk and he and his wife take turns like assaulting each other.
But there's like a slight bit of love there still. Like Hagg are the horrible. There are a lot of those funny. They're not allowed to be run in newspapers anymore.
Blondie and Dagwin, the times we live in. Right. Yeah. Well, when you really when you really parse it out, most comic strips are really about domestic abuse and the case of Haggren horrible reading and pillaging.
He talks this one strip where he talks of this. I think our listeners that went like this is one where Helga, his wife is saying, Oh, this is I remember when I met a haggard. He stored my castle and took me from my husband. Yeah, he always has a glove and he like he'll bat his wife over her head.
No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know what childhood that didn't make it on the funniest air in actual. This isn't the band St. Beers.
I have a question about the nature of going back to aero says that God and then what he's going to be discussed in the Socrates speech about the divine are any aspects of this conversation like third rail and Athenian society, whereas it just well, these are a group of philosopher thoughtful people getting together and just opining about theological matters or is there a radical or sort of rail element to at all at all to what's being discussed, like where it has to be in a home. Yeah. So this couldn't be an example where this couldn't be a dialogue that's taking place in the open air. Let's say, yeah, I'm so we already talked a little bit about how he's kind of with his peers here, Socrates is.
And so after he's sort of chastised and then after he's refuted Agathon, then he turns to his speech proper, which even that is not a speech. It's a it's an account of a conversation he had with a lady named Diatima or D.A.T. on how people pronounce it. And your question, I think, so now like just try to in your mind, I can't even remember all the layers at this point.
So when you're reading the conversation between Socrates and Diatima, so Diatima speaking, but who's speaking? It's Socrates's account of the automa, but it's actually no, no, it's a versus the demis is account of Socrates's account of Diatima. No, it's a Polydorores's account of versus the demis is account of Socrates's account of Diatima. But it's actually the second time a Polydorores has told this story to somebody to an unnamed group of comrades.
And this is all by the way, 10 years after the fact. And unless you forget, it's Plato telling the story of a Polydorores, it's actually a Sunday, so this is the most layers, I think, Alex could probably correct me of any platonic dialogue, which should put the reader on a little bit of notice that the author is trying to separate himself as much as possible from the content of the speech. So your question was, is anything here through a rail? And I would just say, maybe I'm going to jump to the heart of it.
Yes, Socrates is going to recount this conversation with Diatima. And I just want to remind listeners, what I said at the beginning that so far every speaker has talked about the divinity of arrows, right? Is it an old God? Is it a young God?
Is it one God? Is it a two God? And Socrates comes along and says, it's not a God. I mean, I once said in class, I think that this is basically Plato reenacting the crime of Socrates not believing in the gods of Athens.
Yes, I think this had to happen in a private setting. There's a reason Socrates isn't remarrying the story, right? He's not telling the story. Someone else is telling the story.
He's only confirming some of the details. And it's 10 years later. So I suspect that something's going on on in Athens where he feels like there's a little bit more liberty to say these things right now. That's a suspicion I have.
And so yes, I think that, look at that, and not only does he say that he eroses into God, he gives a pretty compelling argument as to why there could not be a God that would be described in the way that they've been describing arrows. And then if you really think it through, you'd have to ask yourself to what extent does that account of arrows applied to the other Greek divinities as well? So then it's things just started floating, right? That's like, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And all the idols of Athens go tumbling down. And there's two dialogues where Socrates is this critical of the gods, and they're both ones that take place overnight, which is the republic, right, where he just basically says, all the stories are BS, and they need to be regulated by the president. He doesn't need the fro too, but so one guy right. He's like, I receive the stories of the poets with annoyance or something like that, or where people believe in this, I'm an annoyed, he suggested there, but he's most overtly, I think, critical of sort of Greek gods and in the supposed one, the both ones that take place.
All nice. Can I just mention one more thing about so as we get to Socrates's speech, as I mentioned, you know, all these other people have been like arrows as this arrows as that he begins by saying, well, look, when I was a young man, I met this lady, Diatima, Deotima from Mantenia. When I teach this, I always joke like her name is Prophet because this would sound ridiculous in the Greek. Deotima means what?
Honor of God, it means something like prophecy. So her name is like Honor of God from Prophets from Providence, right? And then of course, this sounds ridiculous. So she seems completely fictionalized.
So the other part of the layer is this is completely fictionalized. There must not have been a Deotima, I'm willing to say that in my own name, but a couple other points though, Socrates is going to relate a biographical account of himself, where he learned something deeply important about the character of arrows, which is central to his philosophy. And he's going to say that he learned it from a woman, who's a priest. Now, if you remember, way back at the beginning, was it Eric Simechus?
Who sent away the dancing girls? Yeah, right. And so like this is a completely male-dominated party. It's been extremely masculine.
Most of the speakers have been speaking about arrows as though it's strictly male affair because women aren't serious enough to rise to that level. The exception so far as he's aristocracy is by the way. And now Socrates is coming back in. I think the reason he's bringing it down to one reason she's a woman is to sort of remind them that if they're only focusing on the masculine part of human nature, they're deeply missing something important about the phenomenon of love.
And that's the reproductive part that Alex has already been hinting at. So a few things just to restate. This conversation with Deotima is a conversation he's not simply giving a speech. He's learning from a woman.
The only other time that I know of him, the playtime dialogue for Socrates claims to know something expertly is in a dialogue called the mexinus. There he claims to have learned how to give eulogies, not enough, from a woman who happens to have been a courtesan, a lady friend of paraclys. So the only two things in the playtime dialogue with Socrates claims to know expertly he's learned from women. And they're connected, right?
Eulogies and love. And we're giving you a eulogy for love. I think that's everything I want to say about just the frame of that I'm our Deotima. Oh, there's one thing I want to say, sorry, that this is something I don't understand.
When he begins talking about it, he says, she's the one that made this the plague sort of stay away for 10 years. She delayed the plague for 10 years. What was that mean? Like, for listeners don't know, I think when we did our paraclys episode, we talked about this.
There was a plague that came to Athens wiped a bunch of people out, right at the height of the Peloponnesian War. It was really disastrous for Athens. And when she delayed it to the part when Erykles pulls everybody inside the scene. Right.
So it made it worse, potentially. Yeah, exactly right. So make it go away. It's one of the many indications, obviously, there's more going on than just one about to say, but it's one of the many indications that we're supposed to situate this relative to the Pelopon.
No question. Peloponnes is so important here. No question. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. So one thing I really want to add to that about two teams that right before Socrates brings her in, as Socrates is closing the argument on Agathon, he says, so if Eris is in need of beautiful things and the good things are fair, he would be in need of the good things as well. To which Agathon applies, I Socrates would not be able to contradict you.
So let it be as you say it's emphatic in the Greek. So he's trying to take the argument off his shoulders, put it on Socrates. And Socrates says, not at all my dear Agathon, it is rather that you are unable to contradict the truth, since it's not at all hard to contradict Socrates. Right.
And at this point says, and I shall let you go for now. I'll enter this speech about Eris there once, from a woman a little further down the page, he says, for I came pretty near in speaking to her, saying the same sort of things that Agathon said to me now. So they're different in that when Agathon reacts to the speech, he accused the Socrates basically of destroying the argument. But when Socrates reacts, he says, and I said, how do you mean it to your team?
Is Eris after all ugly and bad? He's way more willing to just be coherent Eris. And so I think that's the crucial difference. So this is one of the situations where he's trying to bring Agathon along, but Agathon's commitments are such that he's not willing to accept this argument.
He needs to believe on some level that you can love beautiful things as he does and be perfectly beautiful. The Socrates is far more open, and so he's going to give a, I think Greg and I agree on this, a fictitious account of his own education that if Agathon ever sort of wakes up, he could maybe follow on his own and learn something from him, just to say that this is true of the Fido as well. When you get an account from Socrates, it's always somehow geared to whoever he's speaking to. So we're going to take this teaching at all seriously.
We have to understand how it's in some way might be adjusted to suit Agathon. And I'll just say if philosophy is finally creating beautiful, perfect images of virtue, right, and acting perfectly well and therefore living eternally because your images are so perfect, that's really appeals to somebody like Agathon who deeply who finds deeply satisfying fame as a confirmation of his own beauty and goodness, which I don't think Socrates cares for. He's not willing to go that far. Yeah, I totally agree.
That's really good. So the whole speech seems to me, it's obviously he takes down Agathon as I mentioned, Eris Daffan is Phaedris Plasani, but it's geared principally at Agathon. I think that that's right. So just to get into the heart of the argument real quick, the first part of the argument, which I'm just loosely calling Deodemus Theology, you're right.
So he says, look, I used to be very much like you and I thought that love is that the beautiful, I thought Eris was beautiful. I thought it was a great God. And Deodemus says, I'm not so sure that that's right. She refuted him.
He's not beautiful. He's not good. And Socrates asked the question as you just mentioned, so he's more willing to learn than Agathon. He says, what do you mean is Eris ugly and bad?
And she says, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, come on. He's in the middle. You're making a mistake of thinking that they're only dichotomies. Like, Alex mentioned earlier about there's taller, there's more beautiful these kinds of things.
And so Socrates, and I think I get this from Strauss, he makes a mistake here. And the mistake was not recognizing that there was a middle between these categories. And for what it's worth, the word metoxu in Greek, the middle is really important in this dialogue. I think it's actually one of the words that when else somebody comes in, he sits in the talk to between Agathon and Socrates, and I don't have the number off top of my head, but it's repeated a lot.
I don't know what that means except to say that being in the middle is a theme of this dialogue. So somehow love is connected to being in the middle of something. Maybe it's being in the middle of mortal and immortal. We're the only species that is mortal but somehow aware of our mortality.
That's kind of in between being simply more like dogs and immortal, like the college or something like this. There's just a number of ways in which that theme persists. So in any event, she keeps going on, Diatima, with Soggy. He specifically said, I wouldn't leave out anything ugly and bad in my speech.
So she says, look, we haven't shown it's ugly and bad yet. Don't believe that yet. Always shown it's not beautiful and not good. Do we ever, do we ever actually address this issue of, to what extent it's in the middle and to what extent it might be ugly or bad in some respects?
Just as an open question. Where in the middle it is, it might be closer to ugly than, yeah. It could be the opposite. She's saying all the arguments is shown is that it's not these things.
It hasn't yet shown that it's the opposite. So then the next step, by the way, all you previous speakers said, Eros is beautiful and they've also said Eros is a god. And so the very first thing she shows Socrates is that Eros is not beautiful or good. The next step, and this is at 202B, Socrates says, okay, fine, maybe not fine.
I'm with you, at least we can all agree that Eros is a god, a great god. And then Dada says, well, if by everyone you mean you and me, then no, because I don't agree that Eros is a god and you don't. She says, you are one and I am one that does not believe that Eros is a god. And so then Socrates says, okay, well, if it's not a god, what is it?
And here again, she says, well, the gods are immortal. The opposite of immortal is mortal. So it must be mortal. And Socrates says, look it.
So are you saying that Eros, the god Eros is immortal being? And she says, Socrates, and you learn nothing just a moment ago. It's in between. And so actually, he says made another mistake.
So before he didn't recognize that there was an in between between beautiful and ugly. And here he didn't recognize that there's an in between between immortal and mortal. At one point, sure. So, so, Socrates, she says, it's not beautiful and ugly.
And so, he's yet it is agreed on by all that he is a great god. So he has to choose now between his belief that Eros is a great god. And the argument that Eros is not beautiful and not good. Because the assumption is if he's a great god, he must be beautiful.
Yeah. So he can just deny reason. Sure. But instead he denies, he accepts the denial of divinity and he wants to fall out the arc.
This is very typical of the young Socrates, by the way. He always pushes the argument for it. But he doesn't push the argument here very well. Right.
So he's been reviewed by her the first time when she says there's a middle between beautiful and ugly, which by the way, common sense, we all know. But then she's when she says there's a middle between mortal and immorally says, well, yeah, of course, but the acceptance there is based on his having been shown just a moment ago, there's a middle between beautiful and ugly that there is a middle between mortal and immortal strikes me as not obvious and even false. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, go ahead. Go ahead.
Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Go ahead. Go ahead. I just think that she, I think that Diatima, actually, of course, is her, but Diatima is tricking Socrates. She's lulled him into accepting this middle argument where it did apply and using it where it did not apply.
Like I think that's right. Mortally mortal is dichotomous. Ugly, beautiful is not. You either die or you don't.
There's no like I'm half dead, despite the fact that we use that phrase euphemistically. Right. I know that I know I'm old. I'm half dead.
I went for the grave. I got it. What's interesting because the ultimate argument that he is in the middle is that he's connected or between. Right.
He's sort of like the messenger between man and gods. Right. So in so far as there are gods and he's necessarily connected to them arrows, he would be immortal. But in so far as he's connected to a mortal thing, that could always be eradicated.