Plato’s Symposium
I read today a nice edition of Plato’s Symposium (aff), which tries to describe the true nature of Love. Note that this is Love rather than love, so much time is spent deciding on if Love is a god and if so what kind of deity he is, only to have those notions overturned by Socrates who claims Love is in fact a spirit, something that binds different things together but in and of itself is not a thing:
The first, most startling thing about the book is that love between men and boys was considered not taboo, but the most ideal course of nature, so that what we might call today homosexuality and pederastry were simply mentoring and affection. Probably the lifespan of the Greeks had something to do with it, as they lived at most half of what we do now. Interesting, as well, is the idea that the only form of true love is between two men, for the purpose of attaining virtues and sharing intellectual discourse.
My favorite bit is Aristophanes’ speech about the nature of Love, where mankind originally had two heads, eight limbs, etc, and was sundered in half by the gods. So love is literally us trying to reunite with our missing half:
That’s how, long ago, the innate desire of human beings for each other started. It draws the two halves of our original nature back together and tries to make one out of two and to heal the wound in human nature.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is tagged with intellectual discourse, innate desire, course of nature, aristophanes, two heads, aff, lifespan, deity, true nature, plato, greeks, human nature, different things, virtues, socrates, true love, affection, notions, human beings, mankind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on August 27th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
There’s a song in Hedwig and the Angry Inch based on this book.