LOVE AND CULTURE

by W. B. Macomber

INTRODUCTION

 

Here are 16 lectures on Plato's Symposium, built up from the Philosophy 1A course I gave last winter (1971). Two of my students had the idea. Since I had wanted to teach the Symposium and the Phaedrus, why not work up the Symposium from the surviving tapes, and print them up as background for the class this year, freeing me for a frontal attack on the Phaedrus? Great, I said, absolutely great! Ecce scholar! I'm most grateful to them.

The Republic is Plato's dialogue about man's public life, and the attempt to find a public solution to the problem of life, to establish general rules for living, a moral code. The Symposium is its companion piece, Plato's work on the inner life, and the attempt to find meaning in (or introduce some order into) our personal lives, whatever the social environment, which the Republic, in the spirit of B.F. Skinner, had vainly sought to make ideal.

There is no ideal state of society, and no general solution to the problem of life. The Republic is an announced failure. Any scheme which hinges on a lie and a miracle is an announced failure, and besides, in the Myth of Ur in Book X, the man reincarnated from a previous existence in a just state chooses the life of a tyrant, for Plato the worst of all possible deaths. (It sounds like Hamlet to me.) We fail to understand this, and make Plato a totalitarian, like Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. We make Plato into a totalitarian on the basis of a book in which he demonstrates that the whole totalitarian quest, the improvement of the species through the manipulation of the environment, is in principle impossible of attainment. We might as well take Prof. Godel to be a mathematical dogmatist. We refuse to see that the book portrays the failure of Plato's attempt to determine the best general conditions for fostering good men and the good life (the same thing seen from two points of view). We are too deeply committed to an objective basis of moral principles to see what Plato is doing in the Republic, the same blindness which keeps us from seeing what is right before our noses in the Phaedrus, a great love between a teacher and a student.

The Republic isn't even a work in politics. If you want Plato's views on politics, you must look to the Laws. One would have thought Plato had made this unmistakably clear. We begin the dialogue discussing the notion of a good man, and finding ourselves (not surprisingly) unable to make any headway on that question, we turn to ask what a good state might be (it’s absurd, if the question is not wholly imaginary). Plato clearly announces that the Republic is a work in philosophical anthropology, not politics, and it is perverse of us to insist on reading it as a political program, and its author as a forerunner of Napoleon, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin (interesting progression). We might as well regard Gulliver's Travels as a work in geography. Then, of course, it's all silly.

Everything old Plato ever said, it seems to me, was silly. Who would ever in earnest defend any of the claims he made? That the sensible world is "not quite real," that there is "another  world," quite divorced from the physical or sensible, in which all "real" things could be found, that we initially came from this world, where we knew everything, and are born into a project of forgetting, so that all learning is simply recollection, remembering, Erinnerung. Isn't that all utterly silly?

Collectively we seem committed to a veneration of Plato, for some reason. Somehow a department has no tone if Plato and Aristotle are not represented. (Plato more than Aristotle, whom one could get along without, and who is ordinarily presented in alternating years.) A philosophy department will ordinarily want to have a Platonist much in the way an English department might want a resident poet. Typically he will be a disembodied, other-worldly pure scholar, a benign old Mr. Chips figure, with an awe of antiquity, who can talk sublimely of "another world" and a pure love of the mind, but whom no one takes very seriously. The Platonist, unfortunately, has become a type.

Otherwise we see Plato's dialogues as a great reservoir of intricate thought problems, which we can develop mental acuity by analyzing. Plato then becomes grist for a linguistic analyst's mill, and we don't so much learn from him as on him. One can carve up poor old Plato, and demonstrate immense acuity in the process. Is there a single one of the man's arguments which holds water, or makes any sense? To claim there is would certainly require more acuity than ferreting out any number of fallacies and rectifying them in line with recent developments in logical sophistication.

We see Plato and Aristotle in the same light as Euclid, Marconi, Edison and the Wright Brothers. Plato's dialogues represent the first flickering light, the first communication across great distance, the first time thinking gets off the ground. Whether one extols or reduces Plato depends on one's historical or antiquarian bent, whether we're doing "history of thought" (like the first chapter of science textbooks) or clear, hard-edged, analytic thinking. The Republic is not like Kitty Hawk, any more than Sappho is like Edison's flickering electric light or Euclid like Marconi's wireless—the first primitive attempt.

We must really get over our need to be superior to the ancients. I have to be extremely patient with students who, when we're talking about a classic author, ask "what we believe nowadays.” Other centuries still stand in judgment of us, their progeny, as much as we of them, our progenitors. Where, then?  In a Platonic world of ideas, which makes time "unreal," in Darwin's imagination (which was not concentrated on the so-called outer world, the barnyard), or Keat's Grecian Urn. The men of the 18th century live on, as the greatest challenge to our lives, like my Mother, whose life, as I like to think, isn't over yet.

What's going on in all those strange dialogues in which Plato discusses the craziest questions in the queerest sort of language? Is the Republic a plea for totalitarianism? If not, what is it? How can a great thinker authorize government to lie to the people? Why is Plato hostile to the family? Why does he suppress art in his ideal state? Can we respect a man who does that? Why does he claim that it's better to do evil intentionally than inadvertently, that the great runner is the one who can throw as well as win the race, and that, in order to tell the truth, we must be able to lie and get away with it? These are realistic, straightforward questions, and until I get some answers to them, I can hardly respect Plato, much less revere him, as we seem committed to as a culture, though for what reason I can't imagine.

Alas, poor Plato! He is the benign old schoolmaster, with an absurd ideal of love, or the stern, Spartan disciplinarian and authoritarian, a disembodied intellectual who is always floating in "another world," telling us the only world we know isn't quite real—and very down on sensual pleasure and the body and art and things like that. This is the challenge Plato has left us in his dialogues, and one which scholarly commentators have dodged to an absolutely shocking degree. He might as well be Christ, so little do his expositors and disciples cope with the problem he presents. My claim is that the picture of Plato which we presently have is not worthy of respect, and Platonic scholars should speak up about it.

As things now stand, it's not at all surprising that a man of the stature of William Butler Yeats should write:

 
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, 
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend 
Until imagination, ear and eye, 
Can be content with argument and deal 
In abstract things; or be derided by 
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

 
I quite understand how the defiance he hurls at the image of Plato to which we collectively pay lip-service.

 
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not 
Till man made up the whole, 
Made lock, stock and barrel 
Out of his bitter soul, 
Aye, sun and moon and star, all, 
And further add to that 
That, being dead, we rise, 
Dream, and so create 
Translunar Paradise.

 
That's an almost perfect description of Plato's Phaedrus, where we are born again, in imagination, on the other side of the most dreadful assumptions about human nature (Christian, Hobbesian, Marxist, Freudian, existentialist), to go off daydreaming about an ideal love-relationship between a teacher and student, as the apex of human life and communication.

When we come to Plato's views on love, a whole host of special problems are involved. The staid Oxford dons who expound his views on love have never known anything which would remotely compare with the passionate, sensual, compulsive experience which Plato describes. What in Plato is pulsating with power and excitement comes through bloodless, cerebral, and sublime. One might as well be reading Norman Vincent Peale on Baudelaire.

To this is added the fact that we insist on seeing Plato through Christian spectacles, which turns everything on its head. Greek love and Christian love are not the same (nur mit ein bisschen anderen Worten); they are diametrically opposed. Christian love is grounded in need, rather than overflow—our Savior comes to us because we need Him, not because His knees go weak at the very thought of us. And this is presumably the way we're supposed to go out to other people, imitating His example—to which Plato has Socrates respond caustically in the Phaedrus: Why, you might as well invite the beggar to the banquet! He needs it most!

Over both Plato's great dialogues on love hovers the specter of homosexuality, the "Greek disease," which so terrifies us that we're unable to see what is right before our noses. We lead lives like Faust, and scratch our heads eternally, asking what the Phaedrus is about. It's about a love between a teacher and student—that's what it's about! How could we miss it? It's Plato's ideal—the "Platonic idea"—of education, and its sexual dimension is utterly innocent.

Imagine if Plato in the Phaedrus were talking of Friar Lawrence and Romeo, Faust and Wagner, Heidegger and Sartre. The image is so offensive that we can hardly pay attention to what is being said. I once had a student who insisted that the "beauty" Plato was talking about in the Phaedrus—in language worthy of Baudelaire—was purely intellectual and spiritual, like the  beauty of a man's character (say, Socrates') or the harmony of the spheres. Alas, we've done to Plato's dialogues what we've done to a great deal of Greek statuary, in order to cater to modern sensibilities. We clean them up, and discreetly look away from every suggestion of homosexuality, Plato's club foot.

Plato's dialogues on love don't translate very easily from homoerotic to heteroerotic or from pagan to Christian terms. This is because Platonic love is grounded in culture rather than nature, the transmission of one's thing rather than the survival of one's genes, and is concerned with the thrill of life at the top rather than the alleviation of suffering at the bottom. As long as the woman is regarded as primarily carnal and excluded from cultural pursuits and the life of the mind, as in our tradition up to this century—virtually until this generation—Greek (or Platonic) love, like affairs of state and good  conversation, must be between men. Platonic love is primarily between a master and disciple, or teacher and student, and until quite recently women have not been allowed to be either, have not been allowed into the areas where Platonic love might arise. So when we overlook Greek sexual deviance, or Plato's hang-up, we are not simply manifesting the prudery and prurience which characterize our tradition; we look away from the degradation of our society and the horror and blasphemy which we are now beginning to recognize at the very heart of our traditional Christian values.

The Greek disease is not an embarrassment, like a club foot. It's interwoven with the worship of youth and the intensity with which the Greeks pursued cultural propagation, so profoundly weakened by our moral convictions and religious beliefs, as Matthew Arnold sings in "Dover Beach." Ideal love was born with Sappho at her elite girls' school on the island of Lesbos, after all, giving rise to another perversion which frightens us to death and robs us of our wits.

But didn't we turn away from the woman collectively at the beginning of the Christian era, when one could not become a superior or cultured man, or participate in the life of the spirit, except by pledging never to touch a woman, or even to look at her as a woman? Where's the perversion: in ancient Athens and Lesbos, or in the Vatican and Salem, Mass.?

 
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love? 
What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? 
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground? 
When did my colds a forward spring remove? 
When did the heats which my veins fill 
Add one more to the plaguy bill? 
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still 
Litigious men, which quarrels move, 
Though she and I do love.

(From John Donne, “The Canonization”)

 
I grew up through the boys' yard of Sacred Heart Grammar School, Redlands, Loyola High School of Los Angeles, the University of Santa Clara, the Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, the army, men's residences in Heidelberg, Paris and University College, Toronto, and never came into contact with women until I was 30, and found them in my classes at Trinity. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was a deviant and pervert, because I loved members of my own sex. (I delighted in applying that sort of language to myself in those days, carrying over the tradition of the confessional into psychotherapy and existentialism.) But my whole love was the university, and women played no appreciable role there—it was quite natural. I might have been in the Vatican or a monastery or on an English frigate or the American frontier. Everything is natural, as we're now beginning to learn—what else? The first time I met a brilliant woman, Anne Bolgan, I fell madly in love with her.

One can see the gulf which separates the Greek and Christian ideals of love by imagining communities bringing together their chief archetypes and spokesmen. I call this Chambers' Method, after my friend Antonio Chambers, who conceived it. It's a marvelous method for making abstract questions concrete and integral to my new sense of imaginative thinking and evaluation. I can't give up smoking or what would Mark Twain think?

In my Christian community I imagine St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, John Bunyan, Cotton Mather, John Wesley, John Knox, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Vincent van Gogh, the elder Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Pope Paul VI, and Billy Graham. These are the most illustrious Christians I know, the embodiments of the Christian ideal of love, all zealous and saintly types. One might even imagine Christ living in the community, leading and guiding it.

My Greek community would consist of Sappho, Socrates, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir John Suckling, Cyrano de Bergerac, Charles Swan and Oscar Wilde, along with the loves of their choice. (Donne and Wilde are the two to make it into both communities.) All these men are "great lovers," though in quite a different sense from the Christian. They are all men who might stumble over a beggar and not notice him—who hardly seem to care—but with whom one might experience the heights of transport. That's another sense of love. One cannot imagine Christ leading this community, certainly without having a depressing effect on its members.

Which community one would choose, I take it, depends on (and reflects) one's whole approach to life. I could never live in a community with Christ—I would want to attract more of the attention. I can't imagine living for any other reason. In a Greek community Christ would have to be banished, simply because He dominated too much, and took the edge off the community's sense of competition. And without Him, one fears, the rest would fall to contentious wrangling. What would happen to Marilyn Monroe? I fear much the same thing as in real life. And I don't believe the Philosopher-Demon-Lover of the Phaedrus or any of the speakers of the Symposium would fare much better.

One cannot look for much when men who live in the one community write about treatises on love issuing from the other. They simply paraphrase, bowdlerize, baptize, and thoroughly mystify the issue. I am speaking in particular of A.E. Taylor, Paul Shorey, and Paul Friedlander, three I happen to have read. Their commentaries on the Symposium and Phaedrus don't make any sense at all. They're simply faking it, as they would if they were writing on Eldridge Cleaver or LeRoi Jones. There is a mania for explaining speeches as “jokes''—Eryximachus, Agathon, Lysias—as though this absolved one of the need to go on to the  question, what's the joke? To judge by his commentators, one would think that Plato was the funniest man who ever wielded a pen. His P.R. men, at any rate, are all slumped in their chairs, tears streaming down their cheeks. Like most laughter, I suspect it's born of embarrassment, like Dr. Cottard's. Everything Plato says seems like a joke—it's out of another world. Taylor, Shorey and Friedlander are distinguished Platonic scholars, and (apart from my general complaints about abstruse, other-worldly Platonic scholarship) their failure to say anything significant about Platonic love is not due to personal or scholarly deficiencies. They are simply three symptoms of our general Christian inability to make head or tails of the things Plato says about love (or anything else, for that matter). We must cleanse our senses before we can hear Plato discoursing on his favorite subject, and the central question of his life work. As things now stand, we see him in the Phaedrus and Symposium recommending an ideal of love which excludes sensuality, and in the Republic preaching moral dogmatism, if not outright authoritarianism. Good grief!

Take my difference with A.E. Taylor on Phaedrus' speech in the Symposium. Prof. Taylor reads Phaedrus' speech as "a defense of pederasty, an apology for the theory and practice of Sparta." I see it as Plato's treatise on romanticism, concentrating on the three great romantic images: heroism, battle, and death. It leads me into considering affinities between the romantic, the adolescent, the genius, the criminal and the Christian. It led me to and gave me an immense lead into St. Augustine's Confessions, Tristan and Isolde, and Goethe's Sufferings of the Young Werther, as exemplars of Christian, courtly and 19th century romanticism.

Who's to say whether Prof. Taylor's reading or mine is correct? His assumption that the whole thing is an expression of perversion (and leaving it at that) is simply not helpful; it doesn't tell us anything. Mine is more suggestive, and does not exclude his—since there is something "perverted" about the romantic, the adolescent, the genius, the criminal and the Christian. So many kids blame contemporary history on the perversion of L.B.J. and Richard Nixon, and so many adults on the perversion of long hair, drugs, and excessive concern for the ghettoes, the environment, and Vietnam.

If Phaedrus' speech isn't a blueprint of romanticism, I'll eat my hat. The reference to an "army of lovers" is meant ironically, unless Plato is a nit-wit—as we can readily see by consulting history. An "army of lovers" would presumably be French or Italian, who don't make the soldiers the Germans, Russians, and Americans do—none of whom are noted as lovers. All this is proper metaphysics, however playful. Taylor's reading of Phaedrus is an example of the general myopia afflicting Puritan commentators of Plato's writings about love. It is staggering that this sort of thing can pass as scholarship.

What are they saying, Taylor and Shorey and Friedlander? They are not saying anything at all. I defy anyone to carry away any new insight into love from their commentaries. They seem vaguely to support some ethereal, other-worldly ideal of love, the very opposite of anything we might surmise from the Phaedrus and Symposium. Where did the absurd common notion of "Platonic love” get started?

The only man to be onto the high seriousness of the Symposium  is Gerhardt Kruger in his monumental study, Einsicht und Leidenschaft (Insight and Passion), which introduced me to Plato seven years ago, and set my mind vibrating about Platonic love until the present day. I don't really know any more what, of all the things I think about the Symposium, I owe to Kruger, and I nowhere cite his authority. This is because it all comes from him, representing a debt which cannot be paid piecemeal. I started having original thoughts about the Symposium only after two years of teaching it, following Kruger's lead. Now, seven years later, I have carried out his lead into so many thoughts of my own that I no longer know what originally came from him. He is far and away the greatest scholarly author in my life. I understand he ended his days in an asylum, like Swift, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and van Gogh. Cf. Republic VII, 517a.

In the notes I took on Kruger's book seven years ago there's the following paragraph on the Introduction:

The Symposium poses a moral and religious problem for the modern reader. The moral problem is that love is here understood as homosexual love, and the love of young men is regarded as the springboard to the love of wisdom. The religious problem lies in the passionate affirmation of the supernatural as immediately present in the beauty of the beloved. For Plato love cannot be explained simply by human desire, and when it is called divine, this should be understood in a classically literal, not merely metaphorical, sense.

 
That's a magnificent way of putting the challenge of the Symposium. I was quite shaken when I looked back at it the other day. It's possible to write that way in German. But this sort of thing is miles away from anything which passes for scholarship in English, where such problems are swept under the rug. I have come closer to making sense out of the challenge of the Symposium than Kruger did, owing chiefly to differences in the society in which we live, but I can't put the theme of the Symposium any better than that—or even that well, since we can’t write that way in English.

The Republic and the Symposium are companion pieces on the community and the individual. The Republic projects the dream of an ideal community, and fails. We can't even get it all worked out in our heads, much less selling it to people (the miracle that philosophers could ever become kings). The Symposium describes the life of a single individual, the philosopher-teacher, Socrates, and the whole world he comes to represent in himself, by responding to the full range of his experience throughout life. The two relate as Plato's Iliad and Odyssey, his Old and New Testament. There is no general salvation through society, any equitable disposition of things in the world; there is only individual salvation within society.

In the Symposium, you watch a man live through five great faiths, five world-views—the first five speeches. We see a young romantic, followed by a rationalist concerned with his position in the community, then the dream of an ideally adjusted community, a radical criticism of human life as an impossible project (man sundered from himself), and the recommendation that we touch life with the magic-wand of our creative imaginations.

The discussion is of love, or what most makes life worth living, and we hear five classic views. The five together make a kind of grid on which we might locate any view, and they are five views a man might pass through in the course of a lifetime of discovery. The speeches simply replace, they do not refute, one another—there is no question of increasing logic or any of that sort of thing. And nevertheless, while we move easily from each speech to the one following, we can't imagine their order reversed, any more than the order of St. Augustine and Faust, or Liebniz and Kafka. We are here dealing not with a matter of  logic but with an order of time, which Gerhardt Kruger sees as stages in the evolution of a full human life—Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way. As an order which cannot be reversed (though for no reason of logic) the five speeches project the dimension not only of time, but of history, an irreversible order of time.

A faith is something we identify with in the world which provides the basis of all our awareness and activity. A man is likely to go through several in the course of a lifetime. For "faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past; the pity is that 'twill not last." Typically we believe one sort of thing when we're young, another when we're middle-aged, and something quite different when we're old. Living presents a series of crumbling faiths, like the visions of the first five speakers, which crumble one after another, leaving us with nothing to hang onto. Socrates has certainly gone through a series of such identifications, or faiths—he didn't emerge full-blown from the head of Zeus. In different stages of his life, Socrates has shared the aspirations of the first five speakers, and still sums them all up in his own person. If a series of faiths crumble, and we survive (which we always do), it doesn't mean it has all been a loss—on the contrary, that's the process we call living. What we think of as our faith at any given moment—the professions of the first five speakers—is only "a way of putting it," as T.S. Eliot would say, "not very satisfactory."

Through the crumbling of the various expressions of our faith, we may be brought closer to the hard contour of something which does not crumble, something underlying all its different expressions at different stages of our life, to be brought out by the “unimaginable touch of time."

 
Truth fails not; but its outward forms that bear
The longest date to melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more....

 
Of course we can adopt a faith and stick by it all our lives, but this is not Socrates' way or Plato's way, the life of eternal search and constant reformulation.

Plato shows the most extraordinary development throughout his life, reflected in the corpus of his dialogues, all of which together are meant to build a world, as unified as Balzac's and  Faulkner's novels, the "Platonic world of ideas." But the late dialogues speak a completely different language from the early dialogues. The notion of "two worlds," which had been used to answer questions in the early dialogues (especially how things can be caught up in incessant change and still be intelligible) now becomes a problem and an embarrassment. The old Plato speaks a very different language from the young Plato, and "Socrates" (meaning, as I take it, the views attached to that name in the early dialogues) first loses arguments, and then disappears altogether. There is a "turning" in Plato's life and corpus like the one he describes in the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic, a two-fold movement of thinking which Aristotle likewise describes and exhibits: "For men begin by wondering as they would at self-moving marionettes . . . but we must end in the contrary and better state."

In his late dialogues, Plato is not simply correcting his youthful mistakes. He is seeing another side of life, which he could never have seen when he was young—as Kafka saw things which Bishop Berkeley could never have seen a century and a  half earlier (which doesn't make Kafka right and the good bishop wrong). They are at two radically different stages of life which Plato portrays, analyzes, and muses on in his early and late dialogues.

Every Greek philosopher had to contend with the two great towering figures of Heracleitus and Parmenides, the spokesmen of the "first order" in which things are constantly changing ("All  flows"), and of a realm of consciousness, consisting of words  and numbers, the "second order," which is not like the first at all ("The One is...''). In his youthful dialogues Plato takes on Heracleitus, and the notion of universal flux. In his late dialogues, he turns to confront Parmenides, reflecting on his world of ideas, and how it relates to men's immediate, lived experience (the "sensible world"). That's Plato's epistemological shift, like Germany trying to settle accounts separately with France and Russia.

But I imagine other differences in situation and attitude behind the dramatic change of expression from the early to the late dialogues. As a young man, Plato turns away from the "sensible world," from sensual pleasures and an immediate sense of community with others, to fashion his "world of ideas," which he hopes may one day transform the quality of human life. He throws himself into his studies and has no time for personal relations and the ordinary pleasures of life, like Marx holed up in the British Museum. It absorbs him more completely than we can imagine, since he's projecting a world of his own devising, under Socratic influence, opening up and charting the world of the spirit, of dialogue, inquiry, and reflection—all three absolutely brand new: the first two Socrates' discovery, the third his own. At this time Plato puts down the sensible world (which I take to mean primarily pleasure and other people), as in the Phaedo. He has to move away from all this to work on his thing fifteen hours a day; it's nipping at his heels, and he has to defend himself against it. The only world most men know—the world of pleasures and ordinary communication—is now declared "mere appearance" verging on "illusion." Where it's really at is another world altogether, a realm of pure cerebration presently accessible only to young Plato (and perhaps a few other disciples of Socrates).

But the mature Plato has another look at the world he turned his back on to concentrate completely on the cultivation of his mind. Pleasure and ordinary human communication then come to take on new value and significance in his thinking—and doubtless in his life. His challenge is now to bring together the "two worlds," the world of "ideas" he has just sketched out (under Socratic influence) and the world of "opinion" in which most men live, and which they take utterly for granted. The mature and late dialogues show the fiery young idealist coming back to his senses, and to other people, with renewed appreciation—able to experience them more deeply and rewardingly now, by virtue of the intellectual apparatus he had worked out in youthful isolation.

This is the way I imagine it, anyway. To the young Plato the sensible world was a bother and a distraction—as it is to so many Christian theologians who put it down. But as he slid downhill in life, after passing the apex which C.G. Jung puts at age 35 (the age at which both he and Aristotle tell us it's time to put on our thinking caps), the sensible world and other people must have looked more beautiful and desirable with every passing day, in contrast with his youthful exploits in a world of abstractions. Socrates is always bursting forth in lyrical praise of the sensual power and beauty of youth, who seem more marvelous to him with every passing day, like Romeo and Friar Lawrence. It's Faust without need of a pact with the devil.

The Phaedrus and the Symposium, Plato's two great dialogues on love, occur at this turning-point, precisely in the middle of Plato's life and corpus. They are the two great dialogues in which Plato turns back to the world from which he had to absent himself as a young man in search of something "higher." (Old Friedrich Nietzsche might have whispered to him, "How absurd to want to be right rather than to be loved.") The Phaedrus portrays the philosopher in pursuit of an exciting young man, and the Symposium concludes with a discussion of a physical relationship between Socrates and the most brilliant youth of Athens, Alcibiades. We see that forces which seem to pull in opposite directions—the black and white steeds of the Phaedrus, the Heavenly and Earthly Aphrodite of the Symposium—must somehow be in secret league, and we hear of a cyclical process of human development which begins and ends in sensual responsiveness and the "here and now."

Plato's youthful turn away from the sensible world and other people becomes a dominant motif in our collective cultural history. St. Paul turns away from the world (which becomes "this world"), and after him St. Augustine, Descartes, Faust, and contemporary existentialists. But Plato is the only one to turn back. By Faust's day, it seems no longer possible to turn back, and we are driven to the desperate expedient of a pact with the devil to get back everything we had to give up to go the way of (Christian-Cartesian) culture in the first place.

The Phaedrus and Symposium are Plato's answer to Faust, and to the debacle we're left with after the Republic, when it becomes clear that there are no general rules for leading a good life or becoming a good man. There is the life of the passionate teacher in the Phaedrus, and the life of constant inquiry, even without any answers, as an end in itself, in the Symposium. Faust should not be so concerned with "answers" as with his own splendid life, according to the Symposium, and according to the Phaedrus he should fall in love with his student, Wagner. That would bring him back to life, back to his senses, as young Romeo might have saved Kant from Heidegger's criticism—not coming back to the primacy of intuition, and the here and now—by dropping down from a tree late one night to tap on his study window. If he took his lead from the Phaedrus Kant would find himself carrying secret messages between the two great households. For our Christian mentality, as I say, all this is utterly incomprehensible and profoundly objectionable. There's no goal or point to all the "knowledge" we win through a lifetime of inquiry and reflection except making it available to others who will live after us and carry on the great undertaking, and to improve our human relations. Poor Faust! He doesn't have to make a pact with the devil and go half way around the world to find love—it's there right under his nose all the time. That the student Wagner is so unlovable is another problem (or the same problem). Now if Wagner were Alcibiades!

By overlooking Plato's sensuality and form of love, because they're unacceptable to our morality, we miss a great many other things which are clean-cut and respectable enough, like the epistemological humility of the late logical dialogues, the philosophy of history in the Symposium, and the ideal of pedagogy in the Phaedrus: Louis Agassiz at one end of a log and a student at the other, madly in love. These three are all of a piece: sensuality, epistemological humility, and philosophy of history. Our sexual ethics and moral dogmatism are two forms of the same rigidity, two aspects of the project of realizing a non-historical, non-communal identity, like the stern moralist and the virgin:

 
Up to her godly garret after seven, 
There starve and pray, for that's the way to heaven!

 
What's "godly" about a "godly garret"? It's one where no man has trod, where there has been no illusion, transport, surrender, heartbreak, one which has no history. Our godly men have traditionally had no history; they attach themselves to one great truth, and stick to it all their lives. We admire primarily their powers of endurance. But Nietzsche scorns our admiration for men who have "the courage of their convictions," and stick to their guns, come what may. It's a matter, he says, of having the courage to give up our "convictions," to put down the gun on the proper occasion, and take a chance.

Poets are always on the side of history. They know the value of men's "convictions" down through the centuries—how they all shifted in Germany in 1933 and again in 1946. And so it is, or would be, with all of us under similar conditions. Little Big Man illustrated the futility of absolute moral principles. How is one conceivably to do the right thing in those incredible circumstances? The film would make an ideal introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, where we see all human thinking rooted in some concrete historical situation to which it is the response, a response which is not completely adequate in the first place and becomes less and less so as historical conditions go on changing—like the 18th century ideal of government and the Church's teaching on birth-control, abortion, marriage, and sexual ethics generally.

Our present Christian beliefs are rooted in the conditions of the 13th and 17th centuries. That was when they worked best, or really worked at all. They did work then, and glory to them for it. The Pope represents the most creative ideas of the 13th century; only he's six centuries behind—one can't imagine those ideals winning once again the universal allegiance for which he devoutly hopes. I'm not simply expressing my preference; I can't imagine it, any more than I can imagine architecture reverting to the Gothic.

Catholics are six centuries behind the times, Protestants three. Their very differences are unintelligible to us: salvation by grace or good works, the importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the literal or metaphorical sense of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, the divinity of Christ, the relation between Christ and God, and a host of others. We're not sure what it all means, or what we're committing ourselves to one way or the other. We don't know how to take sides when the bloodshed breaks loose, in the Thirty Years' War or the War of the Roses or present-day Belfast—or even Vietnam, for that matter.

Our Christian ideals are simply not working any more, as they did up until the 18th century, when they began to slip. Thomas Hobbes is a century ahead of his time. In the late 18th century Dr. Samuel Johnson won't shake hands with the gentle David Hume because he is an "infidel" and has written a treatise attacking Christianity, claiming it robs men of peace of mind and the joy of life. Hobbes and Hume are the first trickle in the dyke. At the beginning of the l9th century, Wordsworth laments the effect of Christianity on his imagination:

 
Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have visions which would make me less forlorn...

 
In the course of the l9th century the leak in our collective value-system becomes a flood, and in this century rages out of control. This is the spiritual debacle of the 20th century, of which the common man—even the average "educated" man—seems to know nothing. History has moved so fast, and our ordinary concepts and categories are so inadequate to deal with it, that our attempts to cope with our lives seem pathetic.

The majority of American parents seem to have communicated absolutely nothing to their children—that's where the present cultural crisis begins. But today's youth only reflect the judgment of our most respected cultural spokesmen. Society has lost its head, and the present generation gap is a direct reflection of this. Our cultural spokesmen no longer respect us, and neither, in increasing numbers, do our children—or not very much. It has all come about suddenly in this century, and particularly in the last decade.

I believe our Christian code plays a large role in this unhappy state of affairs. Parents believe that they must represent ideals which are higher than they can actually embody in their lives, and their children see them as phony. Parents hide behind moral codes, which simply mean they don't hear about the most important things in their kids' lives, because they don't know what to tell them, and so don't want to hear. They haven't solved the questions of life for themselves (when they were still thinking and deciding), and are utterly out of touch with the conditions and concrete choices with which kids must contend in this chaotic age. Most parents are simply scared to death of the 20th century: drugs, abortion, free love, the rising crime-rate, the lack of respect for tradition. You'd think they would at least question their principles in the light of history. Their principles are the basis of their fear, and give them something to hide behind—like Lord and Lady Montague, who knew nothing of Romeo.

The trouble is that principles and moral codes are rooted in historical conditions, and the conditions in which Christian thinking and traditional American values are rooted no longer obtain. We are still collectively pledged to the ideals of the frontier, even though we're now comfortably settled in suburbia. We extol the John Wayne image, but we're hooked on the swimming pool, color TV, frozen foods, and Howard Johnson's—and everyone knows it. Our official values all relate to struggle and survival, while we live amidst abundance and leisure. That's the absurdity of the present spiritual debacle, with which I have to wrestle to make sense out of the Symposium, Plato's great dialogue on history—not history in general but western history in particular, imaginatively enacted before the fact. I know it's absurd, but there's the dialogue, which moves from Phaedrus to Aristophanes as inexorably as western history has moved from St. Augustine to Faust, Camus, and Sartre.

If our ideals are appropriate to a situation utterly different from the one in which we find ourselves, it's inevitable that we have difficulty with them, and difficulty living up to them. It's not our fault. It's not my fault that I'm not as courageous and resourceful as John Wayne. It's inevitable, since there's not the same scope for it in my life—no scope at all, really. Yet for a long time I blamed myself for not being more "manly," and I was always trying to appear in the way I thought was expected or demanded of me. The question, "What if someone attacks a girl and me as we're walking down the street?" might well have played an important or decisive role in my never having a close relationship with a woman. With another man it's obvious that it's every man for himself; I'm not obliged to defend anybody, when I can scarcely (except in words) defend myself.

All the time I was striving to live up to an ideal of manliness, which was not really appropriate to my life, I could be seen as phony, and could come to see myself as phony—in some sense I did. And this, I'm afraid, is the fate of almost all the ideals we have preached throughout history. There is a sudden explosion of wealth—we're all sitting around comfortably in suburbia now (I mean almost everyone I know) —and our traditional ideals, both Christian and American, simply become obsolete. We go on extolling the John Wayne image, but we live in a world where any nit-wit could survive, and where there is little scope for courage, integrity, powerful moral convictions and the like. Of course we're going to look a little bit absurd in the eyes of our kids. It's hard to be an "honest carpenter" nowadays, but that's not the fault of the men who are carpenters.

We don't need to alter our lives; we only have to loosen up on our principles a bit—the revolutionary no less than the super-patriot. Socrates went around Athens trying to encourage men to get their language and their lives together, but this doesn't mean they have to change their lives—they can equally well change their language, by talking principles which are a bit less pretentious. When we begin to relax our principles, I'm convinced, we'll be easier on ourselves and better with other people. Parents will have better relations with their children, and children will get some spiritual guidance before coming to the university. As it is, I must ordinarily begin absolutely from scratch in instilling principles.

How in the world can one fail to appear phony preaching Christian principles? Lenny Bruce gave us a clear criterion for recognizing a genuine Christian—after Wittgenstein taught us that there must be criteria in our manifest behavior of words we have taken to refer to deeply concealed, mysterious "inner  states," like knowing, believing, hoping, expecting, and the like. Soren Kierkegaard writes that he can't even know whether he is a Christian or not, the matter is so deeply concealed, even from himself. But Wittgenstein draws us back to our manifest behavior, and a generation later Lenny Bruce comes up with a rule of thumb for assessing a man's religious beliefs, which we previously took to be utterly mysterious. "We now know that a man is a phony," he says, "who preaches religion and has more than one suit." I find this unassailable. I had already ceased to think of myself as a Christian when I encountered Bruce's Rule. I didn't have the guts to claim it.

If people want to be Christian, I say: Great! But why must they claim it? Why can't they just be it, without promoting and proselytizing it, or condemning things in terms of it? I lash away at Christianity, but I would be delighted if I could find any real trace of it in the world. As it is, I've only met two people in my life who might qualify as Christians; none of my friends are even interested in the title. Have we become better from centuries of praying? Inconceivable. It appears, if anything, that we've become worse.

How in the world does one live up to the ideals of Christianity? If we have two coats, while any among us have none, how can we claim spiritual kinship with the gentle Galilean? It strikes me as so absurd, because living with one coat involves virtually no sacrifice, except loss of prestige—and if we were a genuinely Christian society, it would be an honor. It's for other people, not ourselves, that we have more than one coat—that's the paradox. With Christian ideals, while many among us are still suffering from malnutrition, we're bound to feel a bit phony. Every day we run a race with Christ, and get the pants beat off us; eventually we're bound to give up trying and live any which way—which strikes me as the case with most people today. To cease appearing phony, the Christian who lives in a split-level ranch-style bungalow with two cars and a  swimming-pool has only to give up justifying his life, and imposing on others', with sublime moral principles.

I don't tell any man he's phony if he doesn't give away the cars, the pool, and the bungalow—I exhort him simply to enjoy them. It's only words I ask him to give up, not his possessions or advantages. I don't demand that he "put his money where his mouth is"; I only encourage him to put his mouth where his money is, and to find better—more impressive, more  interesting—words to express why he is living the way he is, and what (if anything) he's living for (which he is by no means obliged to do). Then they would be wrestling with their lives, even when they are 50. This is the sort of thing I got into when I was 35 and decided that it was pointless to strive to be good or manly in the Christian or American sense. If you're a professed Christian, I can't see how you can help being taken for a phony—even in your own eyes.

I distinguish two types of code, Greek and Hebrew, adapted to radically different conditions. The Hebrew Code is adapted to conditions of deprivation and the struggle for survival, a people wandering in the desert. The Greek Code is adapted to affluence and leisure, when we can do anything we like and the question is simply what to do. After the great victory over the Persians, the world lies at our feet, opens like a ripe fruit, the Mediterranean becomes a Greek sea, and money pours in so fast the only challenge is to transform it into immortality, which is what the Greek Code is all about, as the Hebrew  Code is about survival in the desert.

Absurd to ask which of the two codes is the right way to live, or even which is superior. They're both marvels of cultural history, the twin roots of the western tradition. Absurd to attempt to compare them. Under conditions of scarcity and deprivation, the Greek Code becomes largely irrelevant, and so with the Hebrew Code when we finally reach the land flowing with milk and honey. One can recognize the greatness of the Hebrew Code and still maintain that it's in trouble in Beverly Hills. This is the great shift of history, the work of "the unimaginable touch of time."

Our Christian values are rooted in scarcity and deprivation, as our traditional American values are in the frontier, and conditions of life have changed so dramatically since the Second World War that both are in trouble. The institution of marriage was healthy as long as a man and a woman needed one another in the hard task of living, but now that we don't—with everything taken care of for us by the wonder of technology—it is crumbling. There is the rising divorce rate and the proliferation of free love in the last decade. The institution is not working, and we can all see it. We need a new basis of relating and staying together, ideally for a life-time. And that, I'm convinced, is Platonic love, sharing our creative lives and our fantasy-lives in a kind of joint theoretical undertaking, capable of extending over an entire life-span (we're that interesting).

And so all across the board, once you get the idea, Greek values of abundance and leisure are far more applicable to life in  present-day suburbia than Christian values of suffering and  sacrifice—important as they were right up to my Mother's day. Since the Second World War the United States has experienced an explosion of wealth unparalleled in history. The Gross National Product has been increasing at a geometric rate of progression, and almost seems out of control. If only we didn't blast so much of it off the face of the earth without a trace, and pour so much of the rest into advertising, packaging, and needless frivolities, like our choice of 42 brands of cigarette. We're so inundated by pleasures and novelties that we're sated. And we still haven't found any substitute for Christian values. We don't seem to know how to cope with the wealth of possibility which suddenly opened up before us. We no longer know where we're going.

I say it's time to go Greek! We need a rebirth of the Greek spirit of politics, the Greek worship of games and culture, and Greek or Platonic love. Great periods of culture have traditionally followed explosions of wealth, as in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan England. Why hasn't this been the case here in the last quarter century? Unlike its three great predecessors, America has not utilized its moment of triumph to sing the praises of life in an eruption of creativity. We're a Christian nation, obsessed with injustice, denouncing one another's faults and deficiencies—what I now call the Howard Cossell syndrome. Our Christianity won't let us enjoy the advantages we've amassed, and we're not leaving any very impressive testimonial to future ages. Beside ancient Egypt and Rome and small towns in Europe like Heidelberg, we ought to be ashamed.

Basically there are Christian values rooted in need and deficiency and Greek values rooted in overflow and possibility. When I attack Christianity, it's always to point up the contrast with Greece, to sharpen our sense of Greek values. I'm not irreligious; I approach Greece with religious veneration—which is also imaginative, erotic and intellectual, all in one. I attack religions because I would like to see the energy which now goes into religious activity channeled into artistic and intellectual discipline and deeper and more significant human relations—Matthew Arnold's plea in "Dover Beach." The human concern which is now relegated to churches I would like to see pervade the university, at least in the so-called "heart humanities." Greece and the university are my religion, and I push their claims as fervently as a religious fanatic. I can't help knocking the opposition. But I recognize Christianity as a great wonder which has produced the marvelous world we now live in—and me, to enjoy it—an achievement of which Greece itself would not have been capable.

We should not leave Christianity behind, but carry it to a new stage of its development, and make it subordinate to something higher. Our concern for the bottom must be subordinated to our concern for the top, our sense of obligation and responsibility to a sense of opportunity and challenge. Let us retain all the Christian virtues, but not imagine that we justify our lives by exhibiting them, or that they are the highest expressions of human being, where it's really at. It's very nice if we help old ladies across streets, but it's not the pinnacle of human achievement, and we shouldn't tell ourselves that it is—although for a long time, for most people, it was. Now we can give ourselves to some skill or discipline—clay or wood or words—and realize a dimension of human life of which we'd never dreamed. That's the way to transform life, our lives, so that we can throw ourselves more spiritedly and skillfully into human relations. God then becomes one's "thing" and other people—the things one lives for.

All this is part of Platonic love, that much misunderstood and maligned notion. As we move from the conditions of scarcity which have dominated human life up to this point into an age of unlimited possibility, we should move from Christian values to Greek values, and from Christian to Greek (or Platonic) love. We should begin loving one by one, rather than trying to love all men, quite indiscriminately. It's on this note that Phaedrus begins the Symposium. The last 2,000 years was the Age of Pisces, ikthus, the fish, which belonged primarily—astonishingly—to Christ. Now we're entering the Age of Aquarius, the water sign, which I associate with Thales, the father of philosophy, as closely as the fish with Christ. It's my hope that the coming age will belong as deeply to Plato as the last has to Christ. Plato has given us an ideal of love which can be pursued for all time to come. But all that is hypothetical and fictitious. The important thing is that it's a challenge to each individual life—right now.