The Book Club: Symposium by Plato with Spencer Klavan | The Book Club

Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles, and this time we are going to be breaking down the big, gay, boozy, intellectual dinner party that is Plato's Symposium. But first, in our fast-paced world, it is tough to make reading a priority. We all know that. Well, it used to be. Now, thanks to thinker.org, they can summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form. You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, if you want to expand your horizons, most importantly, if you want to sound smart at cocktail parties, go to thinker.org. That is T-H-I-N-K-R.org. No vowels, no time for that. Start a free trial and put your mind in motion. When we try to break down Plato's Symposium, I am joined by my friend of many years, Spencer Clavin. Spencer is the assistant editor at the American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books and the host of the Young Heretics podcast. That's right. You do everything. I do my best. Yeah. It's good to see you, Nils. I'm very glad you could be here because I feel like I am going to bring you down to earth and force you to explain this. I read Plato's Symposium in English. As far as I know, you had not read Plato's Symposium in English because you've only read it in the actual ancient Greek. Yeah. You ruined this for me because up until this moment, if somebody said, had you read the Symposium? I can say, oh yes, I haven't read it in English, but I read it in Greek. So, yes. Now I've destroyed your pretentiousness. It's true, but I did bring the Greek with me just so that I can be as pretentious as possible. This is a very short book. It's like 70 pages or so. Can you just break down what actually happens? What is the plot of the Symposium? Yeah. Well, I will say, you had my dad on to do Hamlet, which is like a four hour long play. So, nobody, come on, nobody is going to read Hamlet. But the Symposium, 70 pages. It's easy. It's a lunch. You can do it. Right. Exactly. Practically, it's a boozy afternoon. Yeah. So, the Symposium has a platonic dialogue. It's the narrative. It's a story that a guy heard from a guy heard from a guy about a great dinner party that happened in 416 BC. So, we're looking at the end of the high classical period in Athens, which is, at this point, considers itself kind of the cultural center of the world. This is a dinner party celebrating, it's actually a drinking party, celebrating a victory at the tragic competitions, which were the big cultural event of the year, the city Dionysia. So, Agathon has just won. It's a big victory. That was last night. Tonight, we're having a second party in his honor. We meet along the road. We meet Socrates, the famous philosopher of, you know, most of Plato's great dialogues feature Socrates in some major way. Socrates is on his way to this dinner party. When he arrives, when he and his companion arrive, he is told that everybody got so trashed the night before that they can't bear to drink anymore. And so, instead, they're going to have a slightly more sober sort of party. You have to understand symposium, the symposium means drinking party. So, it's sort of an institution in Athens to get together, talk philosophy, get drunk, have a little flute music being played in the background. That sounds great. Oh, man. I'm telling you, I wish. Most of my favorite parties have been imaginary symposia that I have. So, yeah. So, they send the flute girl out. They send the, they sort of decide not to drink too much. And instead, they decide they're all going to deliver speeches on love. And so, that makes this Plato's big dialogue about love. Okay. What we'll probably get to is that, you know, basically every cliche that you've ever thought about love comes from the symposium. This is a profoundly influential way of thinking and looking about love. It's not, it's not like just the sort of average Greek way of thinking. Plato is incredibly innovative about what love is and how it works. And that's kind of the whole thing. We get five speeches, and then we get Socrates' big speech about what love really is, and then we get a little coda. I like kind of thinking about the way that this progresses, all these different characters, you know, because you've got playwrights, you've got Socrates, the philosopher, you've got a hot guy shows up at the end. That would be Alcibiades. Several hot guys. Yeah, well, the first, there's Alcibiades, Agathon's pretty hot. Agathon. Socrates is sharing a couch with Agathon. And Alcibiades is considered to be the most handsome man in all of Athens, all of Greece. He's this really good looking guy. So you got all these different types. I sort of think of this like the galaxy brain. This meme, you know, you get one speech, okay, that sounds kind of smart. Then you hear another speech, oh, that sounds smarter than the previous speech. And then Socrates, he's such a jerk. You can see why they killed him. Socrates blows them all away with his speech. But I actually, I want to get back to the hot guy for a moment because that isn't just a side. There is a lot of homoerotic stuff going on at this dinner party. What's that about? That would be looked on a little weird, I think, at a modern American dinner party. For sure. I mean, if you're just cracking this book for the first time, this might be really shocking to you because one thing you have to understand is it takes place in a very different society from our own, which is the ancient Athenian, the high sort of highbrow ancient Athenian society in which sex is not treated the way we treat sex. It's not, you know, the norm is not for one man and one woman to get together and be married. Fall in love. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's much more about, sex is much more about relationships of power. There are two sort of Greek words that describe the most important features of sex in the classical Athenian mind. There's the erostes, which is the person that, as it were, is the active participant in the, this would be the male, this sort of, in our view, the fundamentally male role. And the eromenos, this is the lover and the beloved. In the context of this world, it's quite, quite normal for men to have all sorts of affairs, not only with other women that they're not married to, but also with, typically with younger boys that they're teaching. The one term for this is pederasty, the sort of idea that if you're teaching a young boy, you would have a sexual relationship with him. And what's interesting is, you know, Plato's not endorsing that at all, really, in this dialogue. He's pretty down on sex, and we'll get to that in a bit. He thinks really that sex is only the first step in a much bigger vista of how to deal with love. But the context in which this is taking place is, as we said, something much different from our own. So we're kind of dealing with people that think it's perfectly normal that Socrates should have this sort of hot young boy on the couch with him, and Alcibiades comes in and says, I'm in love with this old man. Right. It does remind me of the old joke between the Roman and the Greek arguing over who has the better civilization. And the Greek says, well, we have the Acropolis. And the Roman says, yeah, but we have the Colosseum. And then the Greek says, well, we have Souvlaki. And then the Roman says, yeah, but we have spaghetti and meatballs. But then the Greek says, well, I got you beat. Here's how I know we have the greatest civilization. We invented sex. And then the Roman says, yes, but we introduced it to women. That kind of comes out in the symposium. So now that we've kind of made some sense of all these kind of quirky cultural aspects here, what do these guys have to say about love? Yeah. Well, what you alluded to earlier is a classic platonic technique in which he basically sets up a bunch of patsies to sound worse than Socrates. He's just a bunch of guys that represent, each one of them represents some sort of feature of Athenian intellectual culture. So at the beginning, you get Phaedrus. And Phaedrus kind of says, Phaedrus is a sort of minor Socratic. He appears in other dialogues. And he kind of gives you the standard view of, sort of like the culturally received view of love, which is that love is great because it inspires us to feel shame in front of our lovers and want to act nobly and honorably. And this is where we get this idea of Spartan love, right? That if you had an army that was formed completely out of men and their boyfriends, it would conquer the world. Because they'll do anything for their lover. They don't want to be ashamed of cowardice in front of their lovers. Agathon comes near the end. He's the tragedian. He gives the kind of sophists idea of love. And the sophists were these, you know, shysters. Plato wanted to portray them as people, you know, just selling kind of relativism. Well, you hear this phrase today when you make an argument that's not very good. Someone will say, oh, that's just sophistry. Exactly. And that comes from these guys. That's right. Yes. And you get a kind of interesting one right before that as you get Aristophanes, the famous comic poet who people may or may not have read. But he gives, he tells this sort of semi tongue-in-cheek mythical story from which we get the idea of your other half, right? It's the story about how two people are split in two. All people were once glommed into two people. You have like a unit of two people in a like in mesh together. We all used to be sort of like joyful spherical weirdos rolling around. Yeah. It's kind of this bizarre image that you get. And then we got so uppity in our spherical joyfulness that we were split in two by the gods. And now we wander miserably around the earth trying desperately to find our other half, the person that used to be. So that's, you know, the sort of Aristophanic take on love. And then what Socrates does is he comes in and classically for him, he says, well, I, you know, I'm just a mere novice. I'm just an initiate. Although he does claim to know everything about love. He said, I know everything about love because I was taught by this woman, Diodama. Yeah. This is a priestess from Mantinea, from this obscure place that, you know, people will never have heard of. It doesn't really matter. He claims that he has this arcane knowledge, which kind of takes little bits from everything. So he agrees that love, you know, makes us aspire to noble things. He agrees that love is something that sort of completes our, satisfies some desire. It's sometimes called the deficiency model of love, that you fall in love because you want something that you don't have. But he then basically says, but you're all wrong that love is this great and glorious thing. Well, this is one of my favorite lines of the whole dialogue is on this point where all the other guys, they take it for granted that love is this perfect thing. There's nothing bad about love. It's all so wonderful. And then Socrates shows up and he says, I was so naive that I thought the point of any eulogy was to tell the truth about the subject. I thought that with the truth before you, you were supposed to select from among the facts, the ones that were most to your subject's credit and then present them so as to show them in the best light. But now it looks as though this isn't the way to deliver a proper eulogy. What you do is describe your subject in the most generous and glowing terms, whether or not there's any truth to them. So he begins in this kind of false humility of, oh, I don't know anything. You guys, you do such a great job. But what you've all said is total crap. Right. I know. I know. It's such a, he's such a jerk. Right. And this is again, classic, you know, it's, this is the most, probably history's most effective smear campaign in all of Western literature is the smear campaign that Plato launched against everybody except for Socrates in fifth century Athens. Right. And so, yeah. So Socrates kind of says, yeah, you know, I didn't realize that what we were basically doing is lying through our teeth about something we knew nothing about. Like that, if I had known, but I'm no good at that. So, right. So then he launches into this thing with, you know, reporting what Diotima taught him and the ambiguity there, right? Diotima taught me everything I know about love is very intentional because what he ends up saying is, you know, we start out, we have these lusts, these desires for another human being, or we fall particularly in love with some young boy or with some young girl and we want to satisfy that. But really, ideally, that's just the first step, our first kind of animal inkling of something that pervades all of human life. Right. We have, you know, the, the word that is translated as love in Greek is eros, eros, which is one of many different ways that the Greeks like to talk about love. And it's, it's, it's about passion and, and, and sexual desire. That's where we get the word erotic. Exactly. Right. Yes. So, so, so Socrates says your erotic feelings for an individual should lead you to start to think, well, if I'm in love with this individual, I can see how all individuals or how beauty can exist in a number of individuals. I start to abstract out from that and see like beauty is a thing that is not specific to this one person. Other people also have beauty. And then I started to think, well, actually, you know, ideas also have a certain kind of beauty. And, and there is a, there's something, there's a common thread that links all of these things that inspire eros in me, that inspire passion and desire. And, and when I want to learn, when I'm, when I'm excited about learning some new idea, that's actually a higher form of that same impulse to be just totally enamored of something and just want to take it into yourself, basically. And it ends up in this metaphor of, of, of pregnancy that, that once you love somebody or something and, and you communicate to that person ideas that you find noble and, and beautiful, you've given birth to something, a book or a play or something together that, that you are incredibly inspired by and excited about. And, and he, he takes it further to the children, right? So the idea that when you, when a man and a woman love each other very much or in ancient Greece, when they have an arranged marriage and they have kids, you know, 20 years, 30 years later, maybe you don't have the same feelings for your wife that you once did. So then it becomes much more about the children, children are the glue for the relationship. Yeah. And it's the same way with a friendship. It's the same way where when you, or I guess in this case with these lovers, these, you know, different men and philosophers, when they are pregnant with these ideas, when they give birth to this creative thing or to these ideas, right, then that is the glue that holds that relationship together as well. Absolutely. And Diotima comes right out and says that the point of all of this is immortality. Diotima thinks, and therefore Socrates thinks, and therefore Plato thinks, that we do this because we desire to leave some lasting copy of ourselves or some, some part of ourselves in the world. And she says, you know, kids, eh, you know, that they're going to die eventually too. But, but if you're, you know, everybody envies Homer and Hesiod because they have written poems that will last forever. And Homer and Hesiod indeed are Greek poets whom we still read. So their, their intellectual children are, really are immortal and they really do last forever. And that permanence, I think that, that is a key because there's this idea introduced into it, which is eternity. This idea that, well, what is, what are we search, striving for? What is love aiming at? It wants these things forever. Right. Doesn't want them to end. That's right. And, and this is why, you know, it would be foolish to dismiss that. Of course, it's a really fun, you know, little 70 page romp and there's all of this kind of interesting sex stuff in it. Yeah. But it would be foolish to stop there because ultimately Plato is pointing us through all of the entertainment and the dialogue to something much deeper and more profound. Diotima gets to, at the end of her, her speech about the ladder of love, she says, eventually you ascend to the very height and you see beauty and goodness in and of themselves. These are the famous platonic forms essentially. And, and so, you know, this is why this, this dialogue, I think of this dialogue as like the anti-Freud. A lot of people think it's, it's, you know, Freud, the psychologist, psychiatrist has this famous idea that you sublimate your erotic desires into other desires. So you stop yourself from having sex and then all that pent up energy comes out in a book or a play or something. Right. People think that that's what Plato is saying in this dialogue, but he's actually saying the opposite of that. He's saying your body is only the palest shadow of the real good and the beauty that lives in eternity. That you, you feel this erotic impulse and it's so intense because that's your body's version of something that your soul longs to experience on a much bigger and more profound level in every aspect of life, in your creativity, in your learning, in your relationships. All of that is sort of motivated by this erotic force. Right. That is not at all limited to just the sex you have or the people you meet. So for Freud, all these kinds of intellectual games that we're playing with ourselves, those are really just illusions. Right. And sex is the only real thing. Exactly. For, for Socrates and for Plato and for Diodama. Right. The sex is barely real. I mean, the sex is just the beginning for this, this real thing, which is not what's beautiful about you or about me or about anybody else, but it's beauty itself. Yeah. And this is where, interestingly, I think the modern Christian vision of love is, is different both from Freud and from Plato because we can agree, I think, all of us with Plato that it's, it doesn't all just boil down to sex. That's a stupid, reductive way of looking at the, at the human person. And that, you know, pretending that everything is just a sublimated sexual impulse gets you nowhere in understanding your, your most noble self. But Plato, as you say, basically thinks that the spiritual world is like, or the physical world, rather, hardly even matters. Once you get past it, it will look to you like these kind of playing on the shore of this vast ocean. What Christians, I think, believe, because we believe in the incarnation, because we believe that God incarnated himself in a human being with flesh and blood, is that all of those transcendent, profound, noble, spiritual things are expressed in our bodily being on this earth and our relationships, which is why Christians tend to take sex very seriously, because we don't think it's just this kind of foretaste of what will come afterward. I almost said foreplay for what will come afterward. That's a Freudian slip. It is indeed. So maybe there's more to it than that. But in any case, it's not just this, for Christians, it's not just this foretaste of what will come after. It contains something much more profound that we are trying to strive towards with our bodies. So Christianity, I think, goes beyond both Plato and Freud in this. And it's interesting, because we are reading this, regardless of what we would consider our individual religions to be. We are living in the culture shaped by Christianity. And so we can't help but bring that view to reading Plato. Is that a stumbling block, or does that help us read the text? Well, I think it can be, unless we're intensely aware of it. It's very easy, because not only do we live in the culture shaped by Christianity, but we also live in the culture shaped by Freud. Both of those philosophies and ways of looking at the world have so ingrained themselves in our own psyches that we're very liable to interpret everything through those lenses. And you miss the point of this dialogue if you read it as either Freudian or Christian. It's neither. It's contributing something else to your vision of love. You know, there's another aspect to the Symposium, even beyond love, if we kind of zoom out from what the Symposium is doing for us, which is about education. This is teaching us something. These relationships between the guys in the room are, on one level, sexual, but they're also educational, pedagogical relationships as well. What is that relationship between love and teaching? So, in Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which is a book a lot of conservatives love about the— Great book. Yeah. Written in the 80s, University of Chicago professor about the sort of campus agitations that have now only become worse, right? We know that this is an incredibly prescient book in many ways. And he has a whole chapter on eros, on this Greek sort of passion or desire. And he recalls that as an undergraduate, when he had his first girlfriend, he said, as an undergraduate, I couldn't tell whether I was about to lose my virginity or penetrate the secrets of the universe. And it was an admirable confusion. You know, this is an older way of understanding education that has fallen out of fashion because it's so prone to abuse, right? We all know this idea of the creepy professor that takes advantage of our vulnerability. Me too has killed this idea of education. Exactly, exactly. But there is something erotic to education in this platonic sense, right? The same desire for nobility and self-expression and encounter with another human being that motivates our best romantic relationships also motivates our best intellectual relationships and our best intellectual experiences. We've all had a professor who was more than just a professor, right? We've all had professors that became deep, lifelong friends. And the friendship was part of the education. It was part of the way that they imparted not just information, but wisdom to us. And that desire, that excitement that you feel when you really get the sense that somebody understands you and has something to teach you is in itself for Plato erotic, even whether or not there's sex involved. This is something, reading the book, that makes me so sad about modern culture is that everything has just got to be about sex in the modern culture. So it can't be, we can't appreciate the loving aspect of education without someone saying, oh, it's creepy if a professor has a student come over for dinner or something like that. Or you see this also in the realm of friendship where now if two guys are friends and they do anything other than go take a couple shots at the bar and maybe watch a sports game, if they talk about ideas, if they engage in creative endeavors, if they have a long-term friendship, then that relationship must merely be gay. It must merely be a sexual one. I mean, I guess it could be a sexual one, but now the sense of just authentic friendship is kind of lost. That's right. Yeah. I don't mean to constantly just rail against Freud in this show, but this is another thing that Freud did to us because if everything is sex, then nothing is sex. If just going to the store and picking up groceries carries all of these overtones of sexuality, then sex kind of loses all of its mysteriousness, its ambiguity, its specialness. Sexual desire and romantic love are some of the most profound experiences that any human being has on this earth. And to pretend that they are basically just the same as a close friendship or as taking a walk outside to clear your head is to just totally demystify, sometimes purposefully demystify, sex and love. And so it goes in two directions, right? One is that we can't experience the specialness both of sex and of intellectual pursuit, right? That both these things have this kind of strange, hypnotic power over us. And we think that that should be just totally done away with. But also, we suspect all pursuits of having a kind of sexual undertone, which means it makes us stupid about sex. We can't understand intimate male friendships, for example, which have many, many dimensions to them which are erotic in the platonic sense in that they have this kind of passionate desire to consummate the relationship with some form of creation. But they're not necessarily at all sexual in the physical sense, right? We've lost that ability because we think of everything that everything boils down to the physical. We've totally lost that ability to think in these terms. That's right. When everything is sex, nothing is sex. Exactly, right. You know, Socrates, as he tends to do, acquit himself very well. Well, there was one time he didn't acquit himself very well when he drank the hemlock, but generally speaking, when he's speaking, he acquits himself very well. He convinces us, we get to the end of the symposium, but it's not the end of the symposium. It's not. It doesn't end on this magnificent, Socrates gives you the answer and you're done. Then, this otherwise very respectable, staid dinner party, in walks drunken Alcibiades, makes a big nuisance of everything. And then he gives a speech not about love. He gives a speech about Socrates, which is profound, also very funny. Why does Plato end it on that note? I know, classic Alcibiades. Alcibiades was a celebrity in Athens. He was Brad Pitt and Barack Obama all rolled up into one, right? This guy that everybody idolizes, or some people at least idolize. And he comes in, yeah, and he provides this weird coda in which he basically says, he's coming in from what's called a comos, which is the rowdier version of the symposium. It's like after party or a street party. He comes in and he basically says, Socrates, love for Socrates has destroyed me. It has gutted me from the inside out. And I am just head over heels in love with this avowedly quite ugly old man. And the point of all this is that Socrates has such a grasp of the higher version of erotic love. He imparts such great wisdom to everybody that whereas Alcibiades began thinking, well, I'm the hot young thing. I'm going to seduce this interesting older man to teach me stuff. He ended up realizing that Socrates had no need for or interest in him, off in his own world, just communing with the form of the beautiful and the good. And this just absolutely unhinges Alcibiades, makes him obsessed with trying to get Socrates in bed basically. And so you see these kind of roles reverse, right? You'd think the hot young thing is the one that's going to attract, but actually it's the ugly old guy who is attracting. And you see, you go from the kind of physical level of sex and love of the wisdom, which coincidentally is the very meaning of the word philosophy. Indeed. Yeah. Funny how that works. Funny how that works. What a coincidence. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is another classic platonic thing I think is to show that philosophy is actually the height of the thing that you most want, right? You think you want courage, but actually philosophy is the best way to courage. You think you want sex, but actually philosophy is like better than sex, basically. This is, I mean, to me, one of my favorite, or at least one of the most poignant parts of this text comes right at the very end. The narrator basically, Aristotemus, the narrator sort of falls asleep. They keep drinking and he kind of floats in and out. But then he remembers, he says that as he was waking, he knew that Socrates was trying to get his interlocutors to agree that knowing how to compose comedies and knowing how to compose tragedies must combine in a single person. And that a professional tragic playwright was also a professional comic playwright. They were coming around to his point of view, but they were too sleepy to follow the argument very well. Aristophanes fell asleep first and Agathon joined him after daybreak. Now that he put them to sleep, Socrates got up and left. Aristotemus went with him as usual. Socrates went to the Lyceum for a wash, spent the day as he would any other, and then went home to sleep in the evening. So Socrates, after downing a vat of wine, just like a massive chug, totally unfazed, and ends this sort of poignant, beautiful moment or this evening with just this argument that basically comedy and tragedy are the same thing. And that this heightened view, vision of sublime love is also the thing that has turned this beautiful young boy, promising young politician, into a dithering fool. So one of the things that's genius about Plato is he doesn't let us just kind of go off into these happy talk fantasies about how the whole thing is supposed to work. He knows that this is very difficult for a lot of people to process. And of course, Plato knows that Socrates is going to be killed because he's so hard for people to process. He messes with the usual way that people do things. And you kind of understand why. I mean, you love to read Socrates, but you kind of get why they killed him. And this point at the end of the comedy and the tragedy, the great people have to be able to do both in the same thing. How else would you describe the symposium? This combination of the two. That is as much as I can possibly process without a giant jug of wine and flute players in the room. Well, we'll have to adjourn to the symposium. We'll have to adjourn and we'll call in the flute players and keep it going afterward. In the meantime, go check out Spencer. He's all over the place at the Young Heretics podcast, at the Claremont Review of Books, at the American Mind. He's everywhere. At the symposium near you. And I am Michael Knowles. This is The Book Club. We'll see you next time. 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