LOVE AND CULTURE 

by W. B. Macomber

Socrates drawing together all that has gone before, like Hegel; Diotima's ladder: II, III, IV, V, I; the ascent from the cave in Republic VII, the "turning of the soul", as in the Platonic corpus with the Phaedrus and Symposium; three answers to the question whether education is possible; the tragic message of the Republic and Symposium, the joyous message of the Phaedrus; plumbing the depths and delighting in the surface; love (and consciousness) of something—the Copernican Revolution; love (and art) born of necessity and resource—the art of cuisine; how other people can lead us to eternal life; consciousness or awareness as something we must develop, cultivate; Diotima's ladder as an archetypal pattern of the expansion of awareness, the life of the philosopher; "begetting on" and "secure possession of" the beautiful; a game of chess.

. . . So you'll have Socrates in one hour. Mind you, this is the only part of the dialogue which commentators take seriously. All the other speeches are jokes. That's a parody of most interpreters, but not too far off. The "truth" comes when we get to Socrates. Well I've laid so much importance on those other speeches—which I take to represent romanticism, rationalism, science and technology, and radical existential criticism—that I scarcely have time left for Socrates, one hour.

It’s my own fault, all those digressions. I have no one to blame but myself. But my conviction is that, having understood the speeches which precede, we're now in a position to understand Socrates. My claim is that Socrates, like Hegel, introduces nothing new into the dialogue. Hegel says: I don't want to introduce a new philosophy to compete with the old philosophies. We already have eighteen of those, say, and I don’t propose to offer a nineteenth to replace the other eighteen. I want rather to make some order out of the philosophies we already have. I want to make the theoretical achievement which now lies before us accessible to the educated laymen (including, in the first instance, myself). It's all been said by now and said brilliantly. The "truth" is now available to us all in the library, but we have yet to make it generally accessible. We only require the keys of the kingdom. So Hegel: no new philosophy, but an attempt to make order out of the history of philosophy. And so Socrates: no new position, but an attempt to make sense out of the foregoing positions. That's why I compare Socrates to Hegel, trying to make order out of the dialogue, as Hegel tries to make order out of our cultural history.

Notice that all the steps of Diotima's ladder have already figured as the central theme of one of the preceding speeches. Phaedrus talks of the great "soul-relationship," romanticism. Pausanias is concerned with human institutions. Eryximachus announces the project of our collective knowledge and control of nature. And Agathon winds things up talking of beauty, the delight of the eye in caressing surfaces. So there we have four of the steps of Diotima's ladder: Souls, institutions, knowledge and beauty, the themes of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Agathon. Only the body has been left out—no one has spoken for (or about) carnal desire, our hunger for the body—and Aristophanes has been ignored.

Aristophanes doesn't appear on the ladder, and one rung has no correlate in another speaker. As I evolved my theory, that was the difficult part. It all worked; it all checked, except for Stage I. Then I came across the answer to the problem, and it carried me to another stage of my theory. The body is represented by Alcibiades, the 7th speaker. Socrates not only recapitulates what has gone before; he anticipates what is yet to come. Alcibiades talks of his physical relationship with Socrates, and the body figures prominently for the first time—apart from what I call the great Freudian slip of Phaedrus'  discussion of Achilles and Patroclus, and the myriad tiny slips in which Pausanias refers to "granting favors" and the like.

So in the order in which they appear in the dialogue, the steps of Diotima's ladder must be seen as: II (souls), III (institutions), IV (knowledge), V (beauty), I (the body). Here we have a ladder in which the steps are numbered II, III, IV, V, I.  What does that suggest? Clearly, such a sequence suggests circularity, that what we are discussing is a circular development in which the end dovetails back into the beginning. That is why this development is more sophisticated than the one we read of in the Republic, Book VII, called the Myth of the Cave. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to go into it with you.

Plato's Republic culminates in what is called the Allegory of the Cave. He compares human life with life in a cave, in which we are all chained watching shadows flit across the wall opposite, shadows cast by objects which are really behind us, over our shoulders, where a fire throws shadows against the opposite wall. Then the chains break, and we begin our difficult ascent out of the cave, the cave of what "everybody knows," of familiarity and habit, the cave of lethe—forgetfulness, preoccupation, distraction, involvement, the immediate character of life.

We read of the difficult ascent out of the cave. We have to be "shoved, pushed, dragged forcibly" to make the onerous ascent from the cave, out finally into the great out-of-doors, where we experience (temporarily) blindness, as you know from childhood on Saturday afternoons after the matinee. Gradually we accustom ourselves to the light and begin to look at things in reflections, in pools of water and the like, and then at things  themselves, and finally we're able to lift our eyes heavenward  toward the source of all light and of life, of being and seeing, the Sun. But we can never look at the Sun, the source of life and light, squarely in the face. Then it's our duty to turn back into the cave.

At the beginning of the story Plato talks of a "turning of the soul," away from the shadows, up the arduous ascent. Then, in the great out-of-doors, we turn a second time and come back into the cave, out of our concern for our fellow creatures. And here we experience blindness a second time, the thing you knew in childhood when you came into the matinee, when it had already started (bumping over people trying to get to a seat). So we stumble and cannot find our way sometimes, and step on people's toes, and awaken animosity and envy.

In the Theatetus, Plato tells the story of the father of philosophy, Thales. Thales was walking along one day looking at the stars and fell into a well. Thales is the first philosopher, the father of philosophy. There's a legend about him that one day, while walking along contemplating the stars, he fell into a well, and a Thracian maid, a simple peasant girl standing by, laughed and laughed at the great philosopher, the great thinker, because, if he had been looking where he should have been looking, instead of up at the stars, he would not only have avoided the catastrophe, he would have seen the stars as well! Ah, but only in reflection (whatever that means).

So—there you have it—the man of theory who doesn't manage too well in the world. That's an archetype: Mr. Chips, the absent-minded professor. I know now what the absent-minded professor means. I can't keep my mind on all those real practical issues which confront me all the time. I find it impossible to hold onto objects or people—ball-point pens, cigarette lighters, and dark glasses—I've gone through any number, absolutely any number. And I remember meeting James Baldwin, who looked to me as though he had difficulty coping with door knobs. (What is one supposed to do with them?)

That's Albert Einstein, who bought a house once from a friend of my brother-in-law who had lived at Princeton when Einstein came to the center for Advanced Studies, and the experience left him with two great stories. Einstein had paid mostly cash but owed $18,000 or so, and a few months later the man received in the mail a large manila envelope with $18,000 in it. Einstein had decided to pay off the house (laughter). The other story was that my brother-in-law had a friend who said that if Einstein had some difficulty with the house, he should ring him up in Washington and he would see to anything which needed tending. In a couple of months he did get a call, and it was Einstein. "What is it?" he asked, and Einstein said, "It's the lawn. What does one do with the lawn?" (Laughter.)

So the man of theory may not function very well in the so-called real world, and Plato captures this in the story of Thales falling into a well. But there's another story of Thales cornering the olive-presses around Miletus. He knew about planets and things, and he predicted a drought and bought up all the olive-presses, and the next year, when the crop was great, everyone had to deal with Thales. So he knew how to function in the real world too. He got tarred and feathered, I think, and run out of town (laughter).

Anyway, in the Allegory of the Cave we're obliged to come back into the cave and assist our fellow men, and here we get into trouble. It's not because we're incompetent, but we say things which are upsetting, and the returned prisoner, Plato says, is in for a lot of trouble. He's thinking of Socrates, of course. Socrates is presumably the man who emerged from the cave and returned. Teen-agers delighted in his thing—“Go get 'em, Socrates! Get those old phonies!” I maintain there's an eternal alliance between the philosopher and the teenager which Socrates represents and Plato is always writing about. But a great many men of power were offended, and eventually the man who returns to the cave, Plato says, is liable to be torn apart! That's the conviction and execution of Socrates.

So it's a rather sad tale we hear of in the Republic, Book VII, the Allegory of the Cave—the most famous passage in Plato, aside from the great winged chariots of the Phaedrus. It's a sad story we hear in the Republic, but I maintain that the message of the Symposium takes precedence over it. There are two "ascents" in Plato: the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic, Book VII, and Diotima's ladder in the Symposium. The ascent of the Republic is an up-and-down movement: Diotima's ladder is a circular movement, which is much more sophisticated. Up-and-down movement, by comparison, seems somewhat crude. The Symposium is clearly an advance over the Republic in this point, and was probably written later. It ought to be placed after the Republic, rather than before it, where it appears in the Hamilton and Cairns edition.

The story of the Symposium is also not a happy end. It finally has to do not with abstractions but with concrete realities, not with knowledge and culture and the production of better men, but with a personal relationship between the greatest teacher who ever lived and the most exciting young man Athens had even seen—depth and surface. Socrates is depth, the profound thinker who gets deeply into everything and blows your mind as you think over the things he says. Alcibiades is surface, the incredible facade who blows your mind right straight off, the Grand Entrance man, as you see in the Symposium. That was the way Alcibiades always came into a room, apparently.  And the two don't get together. That's the tragic message of the Symposium.

But the tragic message of the Symposium is redeemed by the joyous message of the Phaedrus! Here we find the story of the ideal teacher and the ideal student, Friar Lawrence and Romeo, Copernicus and Georg Joachim Rheticus, Boswell and Johnson.

So now we come to Socrates and try to explain him in a single hour. But there's not so much to explain, remember, if Socrates is Hegel, because we’ve gone through it all already in the course of the dialogue and now we only have to get it in some order. If you're thoroughly familiar with the history of philosophy (which almost nobody is any more), nothing Hegel says is likely to come as a very great surprise. Basically, he tries to assess the strengths and weaknesses of preceding philosophies, recognize the context in which each works best, and see how their strengths complement one another. The Symposium is a far easier task, being so much more circumscribed, a kind of microcosm of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. You've already seen all the positions, and almost any approach to life can be seen in terms of one of them.

We come to the speech, remember, from the anxiety of Aristophanes, plumbing the depths, and the delight of Agathon, caressing surfaces. The other night I had a dream, and I went back to my high school and tried to explain to the Jesuits, roundly excoriated them, and they went away. And then I went into the dining hall, where I'd waited on tables so often, and there was a floor-show going on! (Laughter.) It starred a man, or maybe two, but the one I remembered was Christopher Plummer, the Canadian actor. It took me a long time to think why he might appear in a dream of mine, since I only barely know who he is. It was his name! What's in a name, indeed? Christopher—the Christ-bearer, the man who carries the Christ child across a deep ford. And Plummer—well, a thinker is a plumber, a man who plumbs the depths. And remember, when I was talking about my high school days, I told you the importance the Jesuits laid on plumbing, the sort of things that go on in the bathroom—or which they imagine go on in the bathroom. (Of course, I'm paying them out, but not just that.) So anyhow, Christopher Plummer—a play on words. Freud says the unconscious is a bad poet, a punster. As I see it, that's the ideal of the teacher, Christopher Plummer.

So we come to Socrates from the pessimistic message of Aristophanes and the optimistic message of Agathon. And the first point we establish is the one which has greatly occupied 20^th century philosophers, that consciousness is not something but of something. But I've changed a word there. Socrates says love is not something but of something. For Plato, love is primarily the most heightened or intense form of consciousness. (Or say it must eternally contest this honor with fear.) Love bathes the world in a new and radiant light. Consequently, whatever is true of consciousness is preeminently true of love. And whatever we find out about love will tell us something interesting about consciousness.

For Aristotle, remember, the peak moment of consciousness was talking with his learned colleagues. For Plato, as he tells us in the Phaedrus, it is discoursing with an impassioned student. For Immanuel Kant there are three peak moments of experience, moments he studies relentlessly in order to find out about all experience: a scientist peering through his microscope, a moral man confronting an important decision, and a human being in the midst of the vicissitudes of life, wondering what he can hope for. The three fundamental questions of philosophy, Kant says, are:

What can I know? 

What ought I to do? 

What may I hope?

They are questions, he suggests, which have to be asked in this order. First we must find out what we can know, then we can ask what we ought to do, and only after we have attempted to know and bent every effort to do can we have any sense of what we might hope. This gives him his philosophy of science, his philosophy of morality, and his philosophy of religion.

You see the difference? Kant is philosophizing out of what I have called all this quarter the Cartesian posture, thinking about life alone. Peering through a microscope and making decisions, anyway, are things you do alone. The man who knew Kant best was his servant, Lampe—L-a-m-p-e. It's often said, with a smile, that Kant created God for Lampe. That's not true, Kant is a real God-believer. Only recently, I heard Kant's last words, which blew my mind. They are “Lampe muss vergessen warden”—Lampe must be forgotten. Isn't that amazing?

For Plato, the peak experience of consciousness is love. That's why love is philosophically interesting, and he devotes his two central dialogues to it, the only major philosopher to take it so seriously. When I want to find out about love, apart from Plato, I have to go to second-rate thinkers and literary men and psychologists, Schopenhauer, Ortega y Gasset, Stendhal, Donne, Shakespeare, Freud, Erich Fromm, and they help me understand Plato. Plato thought love not only fascinating to be in but fascinating to muse and speculate about, the most profound experience in life.

So we first establish the point that consciousness (or love) is not something but of something. That will ultimately mean that there is no given reality (something) which we must accept; that the soul is a structuring principle, and each soul is capable of structuring and understanding it's own life, and this is to be a God or universe in oneself, or what the philosopher Leibniz calls a monad, each man a universe unto himself. It's from the pinnacle of epistemology, I suppose, that I've come to appreciate this, and to say that there is not a bit of difference between a 12-year old kid with a fishing pole and Professor Albert Einstein. Each is a universe unto himself.

There is no way you are or have to be, and no way things are or have to be. Look at the Copernican Revolution! Anyone who is in despair should once have appreciated the Copernican Revolution, for there we have a complete transformation of the world without the alteration of the slightest detail. Nothing has changed and everything has changed. There has been, if you will, a “turning of the soul,” a leap forward of consciousness, that is not something, but of something—the difference between the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system. That's the first point.

The second point is consciousness, or love, "born of a rich father and a poor mother." That's preeminently true of art.  Art is born of a rich father and a poor mother, resource and necessity. The reason there are European cuisines but no distinctive American cuisines is a matter of raw materials. You have to work with severe limitations of raw materials—then you develop the art of cuisine to make them palatable. So we have  Italian and German and French cuisines, each making the most out of the limited raw materials available, but no distinctive American cuisine because there are no limitations to our materials, and what we enjoy are things almost precisely as they come to us from nature: steak, baked potato and salad. Cuisine is a very basic art meant to transform deficiency into superiority. There are those who would prefer coq au vin to steak.

Architecture is in crisis today because there are not the limitations of building materials which taught Romanesque and Gothic and Renaissance architects how to proceed. It is difficult for the contemporary architect to follow his material, as Henry Moore follows the grain of his wood, as Heidegger's aesthetic stresses that we must follow the material, be "true to the earth." We can throw up skyscrapers two miles high, if we like—there are no limitations—and then architecture is in crisis.

Look at the sonnet. Why 14 lines? Well because Petrarch and Shakespeare thought that would be an interesting game: you must say it in l4 lines, not 10 or 15—imposing a limitation on yourself, apparently, for its sheer creative influence. Picasso can create great art out of toy cars and coat-hangers. We've got to get you to care—that’s the artist's challenge. I say I love Christianity as a weight-lifter loves his weights. So Arnold Toynbee argues that there is no great cultural creativity either where conditions are too difficult, as among the Eskimos or where they are too easy, as on South Sea Islands.

Art is born of a poor mother, the limitation of materials, and a rich father, the resourcefulness which can take these limited materials and transform them into something divine. (The word “material” comes from the Latin mater, "mother.") You are the limited, all too deficient materials with which we professors have to work, I'm afraid. But it is no good saying: Give us better students, students who care. That is like an artist who says, I could be a very great artist if you would only give me some real colors! In my mind's eye I see colors such as have never existed, and given these I could show you something on canvas which you would never forget! But what am I to do with brown and purple and orange and yellow? Many professors are still longing for ideal students with whom to exhibit their acumen.

So art, and with it consciousness, as Plato says, is born of a wedding of necessity and resource. My art was born of a cosmic feeling of deficiency—the dirty shorts and the vicious way I was in 2A and 3A. When I graduated from high school it was as though I said to myself, you are unlovable, and the only thing worth having in life is love—or at least very close friendship. I will have to transform myself, I thought. I don't know if it will succeed, but that's the only thing worth trying for, and I don't care if it takes 20 or 30 years. In fact it took just about 20, before the project really began to pay off.

Although I went the way of ponderous metaphysics—Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre—I even tried Husserl: phew! (Husserl withstood me)—and had a library full of ponderous old works of Teutonic metaphysics, my aim was always to delight and to please, not to instruct and impress. I knew what Anacreon, the Greek lyric poet meant when he said of youth, “All that they approve is sweet, and all is truth that they repeat.” I was a David Garrick from the beginning. What a fantastic epitaph: "Old Plato receive him with praise and with love, and Shakespeare and Kant be his Kellys above"—great men of whom I sing to you in the desire to shine in their reflected light.

I never thought I would know anything about the world. That's why I went into history of philosophy. I would never know anything about the world, but I would find out things about books, things great geniuses had said about the world. When I began to teach, I didn't know what to tell my classes, except to try to make Hobbes' case and then Kant's case stick. I would think through the whole cosmos, first from Hobbes' point of view and then from Kant's. I would make myself a mirror, because the mirror is as bright as the sun.

So here is my present consciousness born of art and resourcefulness and an initial sense of cosmic deficiency—which led Arthur Koestler to say, "An unhappy childhood is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of creativity." Marvelous! The unhappy childhood by itself is not enough; you've got to do something with it, and that takes resourcefulness.

I don't think an unhappy childhood is even a necessary condition of creativity, much less a sufficient one. That is a Freudian assumption, that civilization can only feed off its discontents, but I believe that continues the age-old Christian over-evaluation of the role of suffering in the spiritual life, and human life generally, making it almost a sufficient condition of human superiority—hence to be cultivated almost as an end in itself, as in the ideal of the martyr. I would argue with W.B. Yeats that:

Labor is blossoming or dancing where 

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, 

Nor beauty born out of its own despair, 

Nor dreary-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

Try to understand this terminology, necessary condition and sufficient condition. You can understand it simply from the example. I don't believe an unhappy childhood is even a necessary condition of creativity. What about Tolstoy? Tolstoy breaks the claim all by himself. I believe joy and affluence can also overflow into creativity. This is why very rich men like the Rockefellers and the Harrimans tend to be liberal men, deeply concerned with life at the bottom. I say very rich men. It is ultimately an admission of despair to believe with Freud that only sexual frustration can produce cultural creativity, that the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages are simply monuments of sexual frustration. They may be that, but they are not simply that, for what they express is not something, but of something.

A symptom is simply something; a symbol is something else. There is, of course, the feeling of suffering and the expression of suffering and causes of suffering—perhaps a cause or the cause of suffering—and all these are something. We can point to them, more or less, and we know what we mean. But suffering is irdisch and will never leap that little proposition "of" to the other side, where Socrates places consciousness (or love). The "other side" is made up of words, numbers, formulae, theories, and works of art as pure expressions of consciousness unlike anything in the so-called "real" world, which they are about. This is what I have been calling the second order—and sometimes (playfully) "heaven."

Thinking cannot suffer; thinking is above (and about) suffering. Thinking is pure activity, reine Tatigkeit—Kant is quite right about that. The most excruciating experiences and horrendous states of affairs can provide the material for fascinating thoughts, theories, and works of art, as virtually all our great works demonstrate. I thought first of Kafka and Thackeray. Kafka is a pure pleasure, and Thackeray more exciting than anything which took placein the Roman Coliseum. But the life Kafka writes about is sheer horror, and the life Thackeray writes about is sheer boredom. Donovan exhibits this marvelously in a lovely and painful song entitled, "On Making Love to a Young Girl." That's the force of Socrates' insistence that love is not something, like either delight or suffering, but of something, something "about" both delight and suffering, something utterly unitary which is fundamental to them both. That, in effect, is Socrates' answer to Agathon and Aristophanes.  Neither has a sufficient conception of the second order to be able to do justice to human consciousness, or its supreme and most characteristic expression, love.

We think of consciousness, awareness, sensitivity as something, something which we all have and all have about equally, simply by virtue of being born sentient and sane. We think of seeing and hearing and feeling—if not thinking—as something we all do, and all do about equally. But how absurd to think that you and van Gogh see, you and Mozart hear, you and Tolstoy feel, about equally! I know there is a sense in which this is so, a sense in which you can all hear better than Beethoven, and perhaps see better than van Gogh (at the end). But the real seeing, as Gilbert Ryle says, is an achievement.

What can you see, hear, feel?—that’s a question. I presume that, if a person were hemorrhaging internally or having spastic seizures, you would see that he was suffering, but how much do you see and hear of all that is going on around you every day?  How much do you see of your parents? (I do not mean how often do you go home.) It takes cultivation—background, attention, at first effort—to see, hear and feel in the significant sense. That is what your education is all about. We're trying to train you to be human—or more human, or fully human, as we're fond of saying. At any rate, the word obviously doesn't mean one thing, much less something we're born with or all have about equally. It takes training, apparently, to see what is right before your eyes, or hear what's going on right around you, to cut yourself in, to any considerable extent, on the "spectacle" Joseph Conrad speaks of.

Everyone is born with eyes, heart, and pores, but how open are they? Our philosophers, religious leaders and poets have all but moved the earth to keep them open, but their centuries of effort have not been a conspicuous success. "Things progress, certainly," as M. Amiel comments, "but souls decline." Who let down the side? Who has not done his job properly? (That is a very Christian question, and judging by the announcing in the recent Olympics, a very American one.) In what order do they close? That's the interesting question. Is it that they close, or rather, as Heidegger suggests, that they never open? At any rate, consciousness, awareness, sensitivity, as it interests Socrates, is not something we are all born with, or simply pick up in due course, but something we must train and cultivate, quite ineffable and mysterious, admitting greater gradation (if the comparison didn't involve leaping that little word "of") than between a firefly and the sun. Nietzsche argues that it is absurd to divide the universe with a line which puts the cow, the infant, and the idiot on one side, and Ronald Reagan and Leo Tolstoy on the other.

So I have my own awareness, my own perception, my consciousness, born of art, my art of thinking, interpreting, expressing in words, which enables me to see more, feel more, experience more—in response to an immense deficiency I once felt in my life, my longing that life be more interesting and my life more significant. So Socrates argues that human awareness is capable of expanding, and the way it expands is by ascending Diotima's ladder.

Diotima's ladder presents the things we attach ourselves to in life, things that bring meaning and excitement into our lives, things that we live for. We live for other people (body and soul, once we succeed in getting them together), for institutions, (U.C.S.B., America, freedom), and for knowledge (physics, philosophy, Old French). Don Juan, John Kennedy, and Faust—the lover, the public man, and the scholar—are pure types. Rarely do we live for beauty, unless we're Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde. Beauty is not really on the ladder, I would argue, like the other rungs, but something about the ladder as a whole. Beauty is not something I can point to, like people, institutions, and knowledge; Mike Lawson, the Supreme Court, and Hegel's philosophy of history are all incredibly beautiful. Beauty is something different, something about how all others hang together. (Answer: very tightly.)

Diotima's ladder might be an archtypal pattern, a life followed in unfolding. We might first be immersed in personal relations, as in adolescence, then throw ourselves into a career and the effort to make some contribution to society, as the project of our adult lives, and finally attempt to learn something about life and advance the knowledge on which our personal lives and society depend, the sort of wisdom that ordinarily comes only with advancing age. We might encounter each of these stages of life when we have spent our passion at the preceding stage, throwing ourselves into careers when our delight in other people has peaked out, and into the project of understanding when we are no longer wholly immersed in the movements, rituals and activities which we seek to understand, becoming the detached man of theory.  Then doers would be dissatisfied lovers, and knowers dissatisfied doers.

Diotima's ladder presents a nice a priori pattern for the unfolding of a life, whether or not its rungs are stages which all or any of us actually go through. Really it's Plato's attempt to take apart things which always go together, so that we see a certain order in them, a sequence which is going on all the time. The order isn't temporal or chronological, but that's the best way of putting it, as personal relations tend to dominate our lives in youth, and professional and civic responsibilities when we settle down into our adult lives.

The question has been raised how we get from one stage to the next and whether there is any necessary order between them. The “necessity” would only be that we are pushed to each successive stage when the object which we loved at the previous stage fails to fulfill the demands we placed on it—crumbles in our hands so to speak, and leaves us feeling empty and bereft. As Jeff Mason says, there are only a certain number of things we can do with the body, and when we've explored them all, we're likely to be driven to conversation—then we'd be moving from the love of the body to the love of the soul. And when personal relations are no longer sufficiently fulfilling, as with all the males of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, we may be driven to make our mark in the community.

The order of Diotima's ascent is then an order of breakdown reminiscent of the broken hammer which Heidegger makes the threshold of all awareness. Whatever we grab for in life, it crumbles in our hands, or at least proves inadequate to sustain our primary interest in life, and we're driven on to something else. The order has a necessity to it, but it is not an order which everyone necessarily goes through. In fact, it's presumably only the philosopher who traverses all the stages, which is why I see the Symposium as an archetypal portrayal of the life of the philosopher, and the order of western history.

In Plato's account, we attach ourselves to one object after another, only to find it crumble in our hands. As a result, we're pushed forward at every stage into the unknown, repeating the ascent in the Republic, where we have to be "pushed, shoved, dragged forcibly." As one thing after another crumbles in our hands, until everything has crumbled in our hands—as in the speeches of the dialogue—we seem to be led to despair, but on the other side of despair we find freedom. What has broken is the bond which brings us to things, and the breaking of all the bonds finally leaves us free, living like the lilies in the field, with the possibility of free commitment to anything we choose.

The process necessarily appears quite different in retrospect from what it seemed when we were going through it. If we fail to find fulfillment in love, for example, we may turn for awhile from one object to another, looking for the “right woman”—Aristophanes search for the "tally-half." (That's it!—no, that's not it. That's it!—no, that's not it either!) After we've been through this a number of times, we're likely to turn in a new way, or in a new direction, and begin to examine our notion of what love is all about and what we're after. This is the "turning of the soul" Plato speaks of in the Allegory of the Cave—a turning from the "outer" to the "inner" world. He writes as though we all had to be forced to do it, as though if we were to achieve satisfaction in the outer world we would  never be driven to a voyage of inner discovery—a variation of the theme of Greek tragedy that the winner gets the applause, while the loser gets the insight.

We're likely to be hurt and disappointed a lot in life, according to this account, and the more we're hurt, the more we learn and grow. Being hurt, if you respond to it creatively is like a massage; it should make you suppler, like a Swedish masseur pounding you all over. After a certain point, you can slip through an unstrung tennis-racket, and you find yourself dancing. Nietzsche says: Was mich nicht totet, macht mich starker, Whatever doesn't kill me (and nothing ever does, we find) makes me stronger. And T.S. Eliot: You will discover that a man survives humiliation, and this is an experience of incalculable value. And again Nietzsche: We never really solve problems; we simply survive them. That's it! That's philosophic wisdom. We learn not to take things so crucially seriously, especially what other people think of us.

Take Spiro Agnew's metaphor of "toasting marshmallows," one of the great metaphors of all time, but applied to the wrong area of human life. Mr. Agnew employed it in a political context, referring to the unfortunate events of Kent State in May of 1970, which is not where it really belongs. I liberate the metaphor to its full potential, I think, when I apply it to our love-relationships with other people. Every time you get "burned" in love, I say, it's like toasting a marshmallow; it leaves you with a thicker skin, and all rich and creamy inside. Ezra Pound captures this in “Portrait d'une Femme.”

The whole process, in Plato's view, is supposed to lead back to a renewed appreciation of the present, and the passing moment as these are symbolized by the body. Knowledge is the thing  philosophers have traditionally taken refuge in, to inure them to the vicissitudes of fortune, the fluctuations of their love lives and positions in the community—Boethius, On the Consolation of Philosophy. Everything in the world comes to be and passes away, waxes and wanes—that’s the testimony of received wisdom. But knowledge, insight into the way things come to be and pass away, wax and wane, does not come to be and pass away, or wax and wane. That, at any rate, is our traditional belief, and the philosophers’ substitute for the Christian God. But even knowledge crumbles in Faust's hands, and Camus'. And through the rift in "knowledge" which Goethe and Camus announce a new generation of American youth espy—the daisy. There is a renewed appreciation of the passing moment. And so with Socrates, who has no great theory of life, like the typical philosopher, but lives to interact with people from moment to moment.

Socrates1ives like the lilies in the field, or like an eternal adolescent. He has been through all the things other men attach themselves to, to sustain or justify their lives. That's why he has a natural affinity to the adolescent, who has not yet attached himself to anything, as there should be a natural affinity between Hamlet and Faust, the confused young idealist who can’t compromise with society and the disillusioned intellectual who has been through it, and out the other side. Only the adolescent is robbed of the pleasure of adolescence by his crucial insecurity and search for something. Socrates returns to this point, after his voyage of discovery, but with the knowledge that nothing really is at stake, and with a new playful passion, like that which he exhibits in the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Charmides.

So the rungs of Diotima's ladder may be represented as stages on life's way, or in the life of the philosopher, where the crucial move is the return from knowledge to immediacy and a renewed pleasure in sense and the body, returning from the depths to the surface. In his study of the Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger accuses Kant of not remaining faithful to his original insight into the primacy of intuition (the "here and now") in human experience, and Wittgenstein wants to bring metaphysics back to the surface, to what is going on right before our eyes every moment. This is Faust's predicament, when he finds that all his knowledge simply crumbles in his hands, driving him to a pact with the devil, which I take to be an “existential leap.”

The Greek was not so radical. The word "decision" hardly figures in Plato and Aristotle. Plato simply portrays a circular order of life, where plumbing the depths—words—leads to a deeper appreciation of life as it passes moment by moment, the things words are all about. So Renaissance artists had to study anatomy and physiology in order to capture the human body on their canvases, had to understand what was going on beneath the surface in order to see what was right on the surface. If we spend years studying Shakespeare and can only understand more or interpret more in his plays, it has all been a waste. A lifetime of effort makes sense only if we actually see and hear and experience more, while the wonder is taking place before our eyes. And so with life, which is like Shakespeare, if not quite so much so. This is my understanding of what it is to return to intuition from understanding, in Kant's terms, and Plato captures it in a cyclical process which finally leads to an appreciation of the body.

Just before recounting Diotima's ladder, Socrates presents two definitions of love which bear careful consideration: "begetting on the beautiful" and "secure possession of the beautiful." I don't think Socrates means this; it's irony, a reversal of what he means. Why do I think this? First of all because Socrates says repeatedly that he cannot or will not beget. He's a "barren mid-wife"; his aim is to bring to birth, but not beget. He can't beget; he's barren, sterile. The barren mid-wife is a sterile teacher. If so, the definition of  love as begetting on the beautiful cannot be intended seriously.

And-secondly, “secure possession of the beautiful.” Socrates' life doesn't aim at the “secure possession” of anything. He has no secure possessions. He doesn't identify with possessions. He's a Diogenes figure—Diogenes the Cynic, who had only one possession, a cup, until one day he saw a boy drinking from his hands and threw the cup away! That's Socrates, barefoot in Athens. He traipses around, gracing dinner parties with his presence and generally enjoying himself at the expense of the wealthy men of Athens; he doesn't need secure possessions. So I said in college, one doesn't have to be wealthy so long as one has wealthy friends.

I was quite secure in this interpretation until recently, when Rick Long put me straight. Socrates didn't just draw something out of Plato, he also imparted something to him, something which has been passed from man to man ever since, as in the ecclesiastical tradition of laying on of hands (it takes a bishop to make a bishop) or the interesting usage of “culture” that, to make a loaf of sourdough bread, you need a "culture" from a previous loaf. Something is being handed on here, hence a form of begetting. 1. P-K4 P-QB4

As for "secure possession," Rick went on, the only secure possessions are of the mind—that’s old hat. Whatever you have in the outer world may be taken away from you at any moment, but whatever you make of yourself (in my case, my power with words) can never be taken away. 2. N-KB3 P-QN3 The Hail Mary (which, by my best estimate, I repeated upwards of 100,000 times) can never be taken from me by any form of amputation, and neither can 100 poems or so, which I'm presently making part of me in  the same way. So Socrates goes in for possessions after all—the only possessions which can be secure, and where you can't enjoy another man's as much or more than he. (I enjoy kid's bodies and beauty more than they, and many of the good things they say as well.) I now say that I live like an ancient Pharaoh, accumulating objects of delight to carry with me to the "next life," or eternity. Only not physical objects—I’m a Pharaoh of the second order. Yeats captures it in "Sailing to Byzantium."

The philosopher or teacher does want to propagate, and to make his mind an object of eternal delight, primarily for himself. 2. B-K2 B-N2 It takes a philosopher or teacher to make a philosopher or teacher—in my case, Fr. Fagothy at Santa Clara, Dr. Edison and Dr. Fackenheim at Toronto, Immanuel Kant and Plato. The telos of the teacher, I argue, is to merit significant mention in the biography of one or more of his students. That's what the life of the teacher is all about. What else? 4. P-Q3 P-Q4 To get mankind straight about "inner states," or make a contribution to the learned journals or U.C.S.B. or American foreign policy, or win a Nobel Prize? (Faust tells us about this.) Of course we professors want to propagate, and so did Socrates. It's Greek immortality. Socrates isn't simply being ironic with his formulae of "begetting on" and "secure possession of" the beautiful, or he would be falling back into the position of Aristophanes, unable to comprehend the second order because he sees things only one way. 5. 0-0 PxP

I should have known this, without Rick's having to tell me. Here I am, the expert on the Symposium (supposedly), and on as important an issue as this, I found myself with glazed eyes, taking notes. I've told him that eventually he would be beating me at arguments (as he beats me at virtually everything else)—I just didn't think it would happen so soon, that's all. I tried to wheedle out of it with a reference Symposium 207d-e.

Now, although we speak of an individual as being the same so long as he continues to exist in the same form, and therefore assume that a man is the same person in his dotage as in his infancy, yet, for all we call him the same, every bit of him is different, and every day he is becoming a new man, while the old man is ceasing to exist, as you can see from his hair, his flesh, his bones, his blood, and all the rest of his body. And not only his body, for the same thing happens to his soul. And neither his manners, nor his disposition, nor his thoughts, nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his sufferings, nor his fears are the same throughout his life, for some of them grow, while others disappear.

That seemed to show that even things of the mind couldn't be "secure possessions." But Rick was having none of it. All those things are on the right (i.e., wrong) side of the little preposition "of," right? Right. 6. N-N5 PxP Interesting he doesn't say "knowledge," only "thoughts." How often does Plato talk about "thoughts"? He talks of all sorts of things passing away, from hair to thoughts, but not knowledge (as I had thought). 7. BxP P-KN3? Socrates might lose his thoughts, like birds in an aviary, but he could never lose the being he had accumulated through his thoughts—like a sock you could go on darning forever. 8. B-N5Ch N-Q2 That's why he's able to drink everyone else under the table. 9. Q-N4 P-B4? Socrates can't drop his being like a ball of yarn, as in my parody of the doctrine of sin. It's a garment, not a ball of yarn. 10. Q-QB4 Q-B2 At first it may be a bit geometrical, like the Laputans', but gradually it shapes its contours to the being who wears it, and is said in the Phaedo to survive him—as Socrates has survived. 11. Q-B7Ch mate in 3.

I went away from that conversation with my tail between my legs, as though it had been a game of chess (like this one in which he played white and spotted me the Queen's Knight). Rick had found a weak spot in my interpretation, and jabbed it sharply—the first time that had ever happened to me. I got a queasy feeling for a moment (rather like Q-N4) that he might make mincemeat of the whole thing—at least I wasn’t certain of the extent of the challenge. (He could turn the Euthydemus on its head.) Only three days later, I had a bigger, stronger, more puissant interpretation. There's no one I'd rather work out with.

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