LOVE AND CULTURE

Chapter Four) HOW TO WIN AT CHESS AND LIFE

The search for timeless truths, instead of how a man thinks; the Symposium as an odyssey of the life of the spirit, the life of the philosopher, the Phaedrus his love-life; my choice in a future reincarnation, and playful thoughts on time (coming to be and passing away); I duck (or miss) a tough question; a brief history of the spirit of Christianity from the Catacombs to the Auto da fe, from the Pharisee and Publican to the Medici Popes and Salem, Mass., from St. Augustine to the Grand Inquisitor; life begins at 14; the warrior, the athlete, and the philosopher; Hotspur and Falstaff, John Wayne and Oscar Wilde: the relativity of values; wie Ideen flussig werden; Rick Long on chess, greatness, and miracles.

Basically, I accuse you of being 18th century. Yes, 18th century—two centuries behind the times (applause). Why? Because you don't realize, when you say, "Come on, prof, let's get into the material," that I am the material (laughter). I'm the subject matter of the course, portrayed brilliantly by Plato 3000 years ago (laughter). That's the miracle and the marvel I discovered when I first began to teach the Symposium.

I had read the dialogue before, but without Kruger to help me see what was there. I had missed it completely. (Like Faust at a baseball game.) "Seeing is an achievement word," as Gilbert Ryle says. I had eyes to see, and saw not. Well, I began teaching the Symposium and taught it about five times in classes and tutorials, starting from Kruger's monumental commentary. Otherwise I would never have gotten into it at all, I fear. I owe the Symposium to Gerhart Kruger and always will love him for that.

The life of the philosopher is what is depicted in the Symposium. The love-life of the philosopher is depicted in the Phaedrus. In the Symposium we see the philosopher more or less alone, all by himself. We see his whole life-span, how it unfolds. Then in the Phaedrus we see him at his best, at his peak moment, the moment when he's most superb, enjoying life most—when he's making love in words.

Thus far you've heard me up here musing, holding soliloquies, pursuing "Cartesian meditation"—in a word, talking to myself. I call this the "Cartesian posture"; you've seen me in the Cartesian posture, all by myself. Today I want to engage you in dialogue, and we will move from the Cartesian posture to what I call the "Platonic posture." I'll follow you, follow your leads in your questions. Are the T.A.'s ready? Okay, screw on your thinking caps and decide what it is you want to ask me. We're talking about the first speech, Phaedrus. You can ask me about the first speech, or about myself, or pursue any of the leads I've thrown out in the first four hours.

I want to say: We don't have to forge light, we are light. My colleagues with their brilliantly trained, honed minds, and the cultivated hearts which go with them. The heart, not of William Jennings Bryan, but of Clarence Darrow (old free-thinker, free-lover), the cold rationalist who could chop a man to pieces with words—that's Clarence Darrow for the defense. He has a finely honed, rational mind—he's just mind, mind, mind—but he has a heart bigger than the Ritz. Sometime read a book called Bryan and Darrow at Dayton, if you think I exaggerate the conflict between religion and philosophy; Shakespeare couldn't have done it any better.

Eternal recurrence: you have lived and will live an infinite number of times precisely as you are living now. Now, what is the force of that? It doesn’t make any sense, any more than heaven or reincarnation, but what is it meant co do? Presumably to make your experience weightier, to encourage you to give greater dignity to your experience, because in the western tradition we have extolled only those things which are "eternal," not things which come to be and pass away, and are called "ephemeral." I say if you exalt eternal things over passing things, it only means you prefer triangles to roses. I can't see that the triangle is of a higher being than the rose, because it doesn't change, but remains eternally fixed, while the rose is a thing of the moment. Sir Kenneth Clark says that, in the 18th century, we discovered that pleasure was fleeting, and therefore to be taken very seriously. You need to give weighting to your lives, apparently, because you don't take yourselves seriously. Your tradition has made this difficult. Nothing has any value, or "makes any sense," if it's just for now, or just for you. (Phaedrus has this attitude.) So Nietzsche presumably wants to give your life greater dignity when he says you can't imagine it having an end, or as anything but an utterly self-contained absolute. Parmenides says the same thing at the very beginning of western philosophy: You are absolute; you're not in anything, everything is in you. You have only to close your eyes and you obliterate the world.

"Could you say something about the similarities between what you told us on Wednesday and the life of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist?" Yes. Let’s see, if it was only gradually that I discovered that the Symposium was about me, and then the Phaedrus, it's astonishing that I could read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when I was 24, and not see any connection between that novel and my life. The novel is about a Jesuit high school in Dublin in 1904, and I was in a Jesuit high school in Los Angeles in 1942, and Joyce gave the most magnificent portrayal of my high school life I could imagine. He caught all the types, caught them whole and entire, held them in living eternity—all the types. That was my high school, as well as his, Loyola High School of Los Angeles, as well as Clongowes College, County Kildare, and I didn't realize it, didn't see any connection when I read the book the first time. That, I think, was because I didn't take myself sufficiently seriously, as an object of literature, couldn't see any comparison between an object of literature and my own lived experience. Thank you, that's interesting because I meant to make the point about the Portrait of the Artist after I talked about finding myself in the Symposium and then I forgot about it.

"Why is Phaedrus the first speaker rather than Socrates, the philosopher"? Because you have to work up to the philosopher. The philosopher isn't going to tell us about the world, surprisingly. He's going to tell us about talking about the world, how we see the world and live in it, and consequently we can't get Socrates unless we get the speeches which lead up to him. This is where all the commentators fall on their faces. They leap right over all the first speeches to get to Socrates, because it's presumed he has "the truth." But all Socrates does is comment on the other speeches and their order, the connections between them and the  unified pattern which they finally exhibit.

I could never have discovered Plato when I was your age. It was out of the question. I read him, but he didn't make any sense to me at all. I began to understand him when I could understand him, after I had wrestled with German philosophy from Kant through Hegel and Heidegger, and was familiar with a great deal of the history of philosophy. Mediaeval philosophy was my initial orientation until I was 26. Then I became deeply immersed in Hobbes, Kant, Freud, and Heidegger. I became a Kantian, a Freudian, and a Heideggerian. And finally Plato came zinging through to me, drawing all the rest together. But I couldn't have gotten it straight off. I had to stand on other men's shoulders—giants' shoulders—to finally reach up to Plato. That explains why Socrates comes last.

It all begins with the dream of adolescence, the dream of transcendence, of glory and splendor, which young Phaedrus puts into words. Phaedrus is the initial irruption of individuality, and philosophy is the effort to cope with the problem of individuality, to learn to think for oneself. Not everyone is called to think for himself, I might add. Philosophy is not for everyone. My mother—bless her!—never "thought for herself," and thank God! She was too busy working, and believing in the Catholic Church and her kids—in me.

Philosophers have been called "dreamers"—and that is precisely what we are. We're dreamy—dreamy in the same way that, for the little girl in high school, the star halfback is dreamy, or for the halfback the drum-majorette. Philosophers are really dreamy in that way! I daydream with Hegel, dear old G.W.F.  Hegel—I'm daydreaming with him all the time. Plato is particularly dreamy—that is to say, he sets me dreaming: of what life might be, of what it is, when one is reading Plato (or Shakespeare). At the end of Socrates' speech it's as though all the adults fall away and the philosopher talks to the adolescent all by himself. (In the Phaedrus the company actually does drop away, and we see the philosopher and the adolescent alone together.) At the moment they're at this exciting dinner-party in Athens. You are there. The very words that rang in that room ring in your ears; you hear precisely what Agathon heard, and Eryximachus, and Pausanias, and young Phaedrus, who's lucky to be there at all (like you). This is big-time company. It's like B. F. Skinner, Buckminster Fuller, Sartre, Oscar Wilde, and me (laughter)—it's that type of company. Phaedrus is there because Eryximachus is in love with him. And a good thing, too, for it's he who says: let's talk about love. "What should the topic of discussion be tonight"? Young Phaedrus says, "Let the topic be love," because he's the young dreamer, with his head filled with dreams of love, and it's good to keep the old men talking about love—it makes them younger, it sensualizes them. Can you imagine Richard Nixon at a party like that? (Laughter.)

Who is a superior man? All culture hinges on this: who and what is superior? The first man to be superior is the warrior, who stands his ground in battle. That's what we expect a man to do! Ecce homo! England expects every man to do his duty. Our word ''virtue” comes from the Latin virtus, which means courage, the superiority men display in battle. Virtue has the same root as virility, virile. It's manliness, what makes a man a "real man." (Vir is Latin for "man.") Not the vir of virgin. (The word "virgin," as the Germans say, is an anomaly, with vir already in there: da steckt der vir schon drin.) Someone once said that the tragedy of our age is that a word which initially stood for courage in a man comes to stand for chastity in a woman (laughter): a "woman of virtue," a woman who says no. Battle is where the archetypal “No!” is appropriate: They shall not pass! (The inordinate Christian concern with sex, and self-abnegation, is a sheer distraction.) So the Greek word for excellence is arete, from Ares, the god of war.

Then, under conditions of leisure and power and affluence, we move from the warrior to the athlete, from the action (the real action) to the stylized deed or gesture which is appreciated in and for itself, so that it makes no sense to talk of a "sincere athlete." Now "superior" has come to mean something quite different—not the most brutal, ruthless, powerful man. Culture begins when power checks (or inhibits) itself. "Please." "Thank you." "After you." Apr'es vous. Merci. Danke schon. That's culture.

Athletes and philosophers—those perfect specimens of body and  mind—do occur in other cultures, but more or less at random, as Nietzsche says. Both are typically, supremely Greek—Greek discoveries, Greek ideals. All Greek culture, Nietzsche argues, pushes systematically towards producing these two supreme types—on a scale which admits of comparison only between a small city over centuries and entire continents and civilizations over millennia. Hegel says we must make ideas fluid, must make them move. I've just made three ideas move, a warrior, an athlete, a philosopher.

Greek greatness depended on the worship of the athlete and the philosopher. Nietzsche says no other culture has systematically produced athletes and philosophers. Other cultures have had them, but they were accidents. Greece produced them systematically. The athlete is the living instantiation of God. He's built into the divine statuary. Why? Because in sports we see the living manifestation of the divine miracle, that man can transform himself through his own effort, by practice and training and skill and devotion. The athlete shows us this in the flesh. We all see it! It doesn't take any specially trained vision to realize that it's absolutely impossible to run a mile under 4 minutes—that is not possible. And all the achievements of athletes in the games, in the stadium—they're all impossible "by nature." Only by culture can they be realized, by 5 or 10 years of training, 15 hours a day. That's the miracle of culture, the transformation of nature through human art and skill and care and cunning. I enjoy using all these words because I want to promote them, keep them alive.

Yes, next question. "What do you think the purpose of the world is?" Well, I quoted Conrad, "I suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all." That is to say, good as opposed to evil, right as opposed to wrong, and so on, are not inherently manifest in the natural world. These judgments are introduced with culture. And culture heightens and transforms human nature. In striving to be a cultured man, a good man, I am also striving to be a great man. As Long says, "Greatness is a social category." Greatness exists only where there is society, and in the minds of the people who share that society. Shakespeare is great in Elizabethan England and Elizabethan literature. But as a man, he's no better than any other man—a man's a man for a' that and a' that.

The only comparison for a Greek city, Athens, is not a nation over centuries; it's Europe over two millennia. Who are the great tragedians? Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibsen (?). What are the great epics? The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aenid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. The appropriate comparison is Athens and Europe—Athens in two centuries, Europe in 20.