Symposium—Plato

I don't really know what to make of this one. Several characters gather at a party and make speeches on love. Alcibiades crashes the party and tells the story of his love for Socrates. Socrates is presented as a stoic, eccentric superhuman. During Socrates' speech he told of the seer Diotima. Her thoughts are the basis for Platonic love: true love is a desire the Beautiful and the Good itself. We find manifestations of this in the souls of others. Loving relationships seek to bring one and one's lover closer to perfection. A key motivation for this is the desire for immortality. When one helps another to be more virtuous. He has made a lasting impression on the world and thus never dies.

This is a weird argument, and I'm trying to sort it out. It is difficult to say if Diotima's idea's are really those of Plato. It seems like they well may be, but Socrates likens something she says to sophistry at one point, which confuses the matter. More on this later.

Aristophanes—Clouds (423 BC)

I read Aristophanes' Clouds yesterday. What a raunchy comedy! There was a sex joke on every other page. The main character talked about how his wife was a sex fiend and masturbated under a blanket in front of Socrates! Wow. Anyway, needless to say it was funny.

The story tells of a Athenian "country bumpkin," Strepsiades who has a acquired a lot of debt because of his son's expensive hobby of chariotteering. He's desperate to save himself and can't come up with the money. So, he decides to enter Socrates' school, "the Podertorium," where one can learn to make the inferior argument beat the superior. With this power, he thinks, he can outsmart his creditors and the courts. Upon arriving at the Pondertorium, Socrates explains that Zeus doesn't exist and that in the Pondertorium they worship the Clouds. He gives natural explanations for thunder and lightening (things commonly attributed to Zeus). "The world is like a basin" he says: things slosh around and bang into each other to create the natural phenomena we perceive. "Basin is king." Strepsiades reacts with awe and excitement. He quickly believes Socrates and thinks he has surely found the way out of his debt. When they turn to instruction, however, Strepsiades finds that things go rather slow. Learning to make the inferior argument defeat the superior is "an advanced lesson." He will have to master many other things first. Uncapable and impatient Strepsiades leaves to fetch his son and enroll him in the school instead. Pheidippides is very resistant at first. Even after a live argument between the characters "Superior argument" and "Inferior argument" (Superior represents tradition and honor, while Inferior fights for creativity, pleasure, and progress—the classic dispute between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and revolutionaries, ancients and moderns) in which the inferior wins, he still prefers the Superior. The next time his father comes back to the school, however, Pheidippides has been fully indoctrinated. His father asks him questions and Pheidippides, much like Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, responds with question after question. His father is delighted, expecting his son to use his tongue to slip out of his debts. When the creditors come, however, Strepsiades simply does a poor job of repeating the crap Socrates taught him, leading his creditors to think he is mad and decide to sue him. Realizing his folly and praying to Zeus, Pollemiades goes to the Podertorium and burns it down. The End.

The moral of the story is that pretensious ass-holes are just that and shouldn't be listened to. Humor is the medium by which this message is sent. Humor is effective. Aristophanes penetrates the reader/viewer's defenses by making them laugh. The result may not be much thinking about the play after the performance, but Aristophanes doesn't want the audience to think. Thinking may end in disagreeing with him. Those who laugh and simply enjoy the play have been won to his side. 'Socrates is such an idiot' they'll say. They won't go as far to think about the implications of this view for philosophy and democracy. In this sense, Clouds is successful like the "Friends" episode that gets the viewer to think that happy life consists in seizing every opportunity to have sex and make biting jokes about your best friends. Comedy is powerful, even dangerous. Everything you watch or read has a message. Pay attention.