Plato's Symposium and the Cosmic Person

Transcript (PDF)

The King and the Queen in the Quest
Presentation 5 of 12

Plato's Symposium and the Cosmic Person
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, February 5, 1981

Transcript:

This is the 5th lecture of the series by Roger Weir entitled The King and Queen in the Quest. tonight's lecture is Plato's Symposium and The Cosmic Person.

This relationship is [inaudible]. I guess that's why the young and the mature…

Oy vey. I forgot the Plato here… [inaudible]

I haven't ever been able to replace it. One of these, when circumstances become less demanding on me, I will reconstitute a whole theory on Plato. He's about as close to Manly Hall as you can come to in terms of the scope and the intent throughout a long lifetime. So, he lived quite a long time. Plato lived to be about 83. Mr. Hall will be 80 this year. All these images here. Both very similar. In one of the lectures later, [inaudible] Spirit Quest Guides: Plato and Manly Hall. And [inaudible] it's interesting to consider. Very similar, about 2400 years apart, their society is very similar. It's just an amazing phenomenon. And Plato requires slow simmering you never would see in any kind of formal education a correct approach to Plato. They usually would, once you get to a course on Plato will give you a little dialogue that he wrote very, very early. From The Apology, The Euthyphro, The Crito, and occasionally The Phaedo. And if you're lucky at all you'll get a chapter of the book of The Republic and that's about it. And even if one goes on into graduate level courses, doctorate level courses, you rarely ever get the full wingspread of his mind and his method. So that he seems to be the most digested of all minds and yet when you go back to him and you read this work, especially some of the really mature great work - and next week we'll taste one of the most puzzling works at all time by anyone The Parmenides you find yourself [inaudible] of an exquisite mind whose expansive capacity simply is like a mountain range. And you realize that it would take years and years coming back to appreciate the visions that it opens.

His career, and I guess I should set a few things out here. I have a classical education and I always assume some of these things that some of these things are generally understood. [inaudible] The Mediterranean and Egypt of course. And [inaudible] down here, and Israel, near East over here, Asia Minor and so forth there. And Crete somewhere else and Sicily here. And Nazareth and Mycenae and Jericho. And [inaudible]. All of these areas in this part of the world were beginning to be civilized, nine to ten thousand years ago, and had tremendous amounts of civilization and traditions behind it. A tremendous upheaval around 1550 BC, which was cataclysmic in this part of the world, interrupted the continuity, the rise and fall of civilization, to an extent that most of them actually never recover. And the explosion of Thera, the volcano here, sent out a tidal wave and inundated all over coastlines along here. And had completely wiped out most of the civilization that was along these regions. Egypt with its civilizations further up the Nile. [inaudible]. All these inland areas, but the world after that had suffered a fracture so that by the time by [inaudible] time of the Troy and the [inaudible] city-states and [inaudible] kingdom in Egypt and a few areas of Crete were trying to reconstitute this era. And before this era, the figures of importance became the mythological cities. The house of Atreus. And Aeschylus' Oresteia, his three-part tragedy. Orestes and Electra, all these people were real personages who lived in this Golden Age. [inaudible]

And after the attempt in Homeric times to reconstitute this Mycenean [inaudible] and Minoan from King Midas. King Midas, everything he touched turned to gold. Minos was the great king of Knossos at the time of this tremendous cataclysmic event. And his empire was extremely devastated - both Knossos - K-N-O-S-S-O-S up in the better part of Crete and [inaudible]. I think in our library we have some books and materials. They were very sophisticated peoples. Large, beautiful urban areas. Well-developed families. Citizens, agricultural citizens. All of this was trying to be reconstituted in the times of the Trojan War and failed. And a dark age, much like the dark ages that preceed the Arthurian cycle descended on this part of the world. And most of the techniques of civilization and building and organization, everything disappeared. And were remembered as only mythological figures or as tales for, children's tales. Socrates, [inaudible], who lived about 600 BC, journey to Egypt. And was told by the Egyptians that most of the world was simply children because they had no idea of the enormity of the past. And the continuities which had been held for some time.

A lone city-state, Athens, began sending out all this of colonies to the Greek islands and up into [inaudible]. And especially along the coast of Asia Minor. And some of these places like Miletus became a league of small independent states almost like the 13 colonies of the United States. And they formed an Ionian League. And the Ionians were the pioneer group. They were really pioneer types. And they're the ones who explored all the way to Marseille, France and began setting up a trading empire that considered the Mediterranean the province of their entire world. Because of this, Athens became sort of the shrine center of a lot of wealth. And by the time of about 500 BC to about 450 BC, perhaps a little longer than that, Athens achieved a period of grandeur, which is really unseen in the world. The city population was only about two hundred thousand, but we can still see the ruins today. What's left after 2,500 years with just the Acropolis alone is mind boggling. It's startling to realize that this was achieved without any technology as we know it. Without any world empire as we know it. And by cities smaller than Fresno, just absolutely astounding.

They began to suffer a decline after they had met what they thought was the greatest challenge of their civilization - they twice beat the incursions of the Persian Empire. Once under Xerxes and once from Darius, ten years apart about 490 BC and about 480 BC. And the Greeks just through sheer tenacity and stubbornness, incredible luck, fabled courage, defeated the Persian army, which was much larger, much more powerful, both times. And it was a matter of the greatest pride so that even Aeschylus, who was famous for about 90 dramas, on his epitaph he said nothing about his great career through almost 75 to 85 years of writing. He said nothing about it, instead his epitaph read something like, here lies Aeschylus who died on the wheat fields of Gela, who fought at Marathon, and the long-haired Persian still remains.

This kind of excellence and balance very reminiscent of the kind of - I'm sure that all of you have seen the John Wayne movie The Sands of Iwo Jima. The images of the Marines hoisting the flag on Mount Suribachi. This is as if when Plato was born that when there was a Greek character. And all through his long life it came unraveled. [inaudible] So that by the end of Plato's life there was absolutely nothing in Athenian society to recognize himself in anything. And following the complete climb of the shining greatness of possibly man's greatest achievement as a society and this incredible landslide in one long lifetime into a reign of terror had the counterbalance in the personal at play in the mind of the fantastically challenged human being an attempt to find out how can we stop this kind of effect? How may we set up the government? How they would find out about human nature? How may we explore the world?

So that Plato, marks a watershed. And what [inaudible] in that he brings into play for the very first time the notion that there is such a thing as philosophy. That just simple human experience is not enough. That even the greatest experience, backed by the greatest tradition, if it has no understanding, no penetrating vision in its nature, will by some incredible natural phenomena suffer an inevitable decline and decay. And there is nothing that can stop it. The only antidote is that human beings must be changed from their natural naivete into philosophy. They must be able to see and to think things through to a point at which understanding [inaudible]. And when it does by that point, we begin to make sense out of the world as a whole and as a pattern. And then begin to conceive in our mind an understanding an idea, eidos. Idea. And that this idea somehow like the image of the human hands brought together, by the idea we grab our understanding and hold it firm. And in a form that we could convey to someone else. That is, it becomes teachable. So that the saying was Athens became the school of the world, and has maintained that epitaph, as we call it, all the way through our time. The School of the World. And the Greek word for this kind of a phenomenon is paideia. And paideia means that whatever we are able to understand and refine down into understanding and ideas must also be given back to persons who were like we were before we understood - naïve, or ignorant, or simply laboring under the level of knowledge known as [inaudible] or opinion. And everyone knows that opinion is a kind of [inaudible]. The longer we hold it we more we defend it. And the more we wish others to adopt our opinion. And the fatal flaw in a democracy is to think that by simply working on a natural opinion level, public opinion, that stable form of human logic and intelligence may be developed. That the way democracy works is that the government is transformed into knowledge, into ideas of understanding. And at that rate then the political form known as democracy works and works evidently better than any other form.

In this development of Plato and his thought, and it seems almost unbelievable that one man should be singled out against the thousands of others who would possibly be available for inspection. But even in the era of greatness which we could name a dozen people who walk the streets of Greece at about the same time who are world figures, Plato still stands out above them. And the reason for this is that as a young man in his twenties he had a teacher, and that teacher was the most extraordinary figure, in Western history, outside of the figure of Jesus. And that's the figure of Socrates. And Socrates is an enigma because he wrote nothing. And yet we have testimony, not only from Plato. We have it from Aristophanes who parodied Socrates in a wonderful comedy called The Clouds. And in The Clouds in Socrates school, Socrates is always in a basket. In a basket cage. And he's up in the rafters of the school meditating. And whenever any students come in and they begin to sort of skirt around and start to argue, they'd lower the basket and down comes Socrates ready to take them all on. And he's hoisted back up.

We also have the memories of Xenophon the great general and historian. But it's in Plato that we find the figure of Socrates and it's in Symposium, the Dialogue that we're looking at tonight, that we find the clearest glimpses of this man and his techniques and what to make of that technique, and why it was that he was able to transform, in just a few years the mind of Plato, the minds of an entire society of young men - many of them who failed because the conditions were simply too corrosive to be believed. Socrates himself was ordered by the state to commit suicide, and the charges laid against him were two: One was leading young minds astray; and two for teaching people to disbelieve in the official gods of the state and to inquire that perhaps there was only one real god after all, beyond the shapes and forms of the state god. And this of course was something that they could not [inaudible].

Very late in the Symposium, Plato has this portrait of Socrates. And the portrait is given to us, as you will learn later on, by a very wild figure in Greek history Alcibiades. And Alcibiades earned great [inaudible] became the leader in Athens. For treasonous purposes shifted over to the other side in the war became a great figure there. And then committed treason against those people and came back. And all in all, was sort of a desperado, but on a grand scale. But as a young man Alcibiades also was said to be the handsomest, best talking rhetorician. Just the most incredible man about town in Athens. And he gives this portrait of Socrates at a battle - Potidaea - which was a very fierce battle that the Greeks won, just barely through sheer tenacity. And he describes Socrates in this matter. It's a great description of him.

"Of this I may say first that in supporting hardship [in the army] he showed himself not nearly my superior but the whole army's. Whenever we were cut off, as tends to happen on [such occasions], and compelled to go without food, the rest of us were nowhere in the matter of endurance. And again, when supplies were abundant, no one enjoyed them more; at drinking especially, though he drank only when he was forced to do so, he was invincible, and yet, what is most remarkable of all, no human being has ever seen Socrates drunk. You will see the proof of this very shortly if I am not mistaken. As for the hardships of winter - [for] the winters there are very severe - he performed prodigies; on one occasion in particular, when there was a tremendous frost, and everybody either remained indoors or, if they did go out, muffled themselves up in a quite unheard-of way, and tied and swathed their feel in felt and sheepskin, Socrates went out with nothing on but his ordinary clothes and [nothing at all] on his feet, and walked over the ice barefoot more easily than other people in their boots. The soldiers viewed him with suspicion, believing that he meant to humiliate them. So much for this subject, but 'another exploit [that the hero dared]' in the course of his military service is well worth relating. A problem occurred to him early one day, and he stood still on the spot to consider it. When he couldn't solve it he didn't give up, but stood there ruminating. By the time it was midday people noticed him, and remarked to one another with wonder that Socrates had been standing wrapped in thought since early morning. Finally in the evening after dinner, some Ionians brought their bedding outside - it was summertime - where they could take their rest in the cool at the same time keep an eye on Socrates to see if he would stand there all night as well. He remained standing until it was dawn and the sun rose. Then he made a prayer to the sun and [walked] away."
[From the 1952 version of The Symposium translated by W. Hamilton and published by Penguin]

[inaudible] character. Absolutely unheard-of unbelievable character. In the schools at that time, like the schools of our time, the only thing one found was a kind of a teacher called a Sophist. Sophist is someone who's very glim, very informed, dashing, capable of enchanting use 500 different times and seems to know everything. Socrates was the single exception to the Sophists. And a sophistic temperament of his time. He had no position in the university. He simply held court in the public forum. That would be sort of like in one of our shopping centers. And he would stand around and he would talk and inquire with anyone who had come around. Well he had done this from his early twenties. And he lived you know nearly 80 years. So, you can see towards the end of his life this was quite a spectacle. To have this fabled, tattered, unbelievable, ugly - he was ugly. He was said to resemble kindly a satyr, or unkindly a frog. His eyes bulged. He was rather duped and short. He was [inaudible]. you know how some bodies are not well formed. He was married. his wife, which was true. Many times, Socrates would in his dialogues say that he had to be home for supper that it wouldn't do to anger Xanthippe, his wife. He had children. A savvy kind of a character. But what he introduced was a concept, which until that time, simply hadn't been, hasn't been used in thought. And the concept, well there are many concepts. But the one I want to [inaudible]

During the break I'll leave this open; there's a Greek dictionary here. You can look up some of the words, some of the other words for your stuff.

The peculiar thing about Socrates' use of this word, and it comes from [inaudible] which means compile or to place something. With an object in mind that you don't just put it down and leave it there. But that you position it so that your movements have a relationship to it and with a hypothesis instead of it being simply a mental proposition - which stands for a suggestion - it is a dynamic, verbal kind of a process. An examination in motion. And that we should crack [inaudible]. The reason for this was that, as I read you from The Symposium, was that Socrates believed that we have within ourselves all of universal ideas or forms of knowing already. That they are there. That they are there latent, just as the flower is in the bud, the bud is in the stem, and the stem in the seed. That all of the universal ideas are in each one of them. And the procedure is not to place something in it which is not there. Not to fill the box with things, but rather to nurture and coax out that kind of blossoming, of intelligence which are there in speed already. And need only, as he says, a midwife to deliver them from the obscurity of ignorance into the blossoming, the birth, or the rebirth if you would, of intelligence. And toward that end that all of these prophecies of development compete within into their blossom. This is a kind of therapeia. We use the word therapy today. And they used the word therapeia. [inaudible] the same stuff. [inaudible] meant the restoration of health. Not simply to adjust you to the circumstances as you saw them. And not simply to put you back into fairly decent shape visa-vee the average population. The therapeia ultimately to restore you to your universal form which partakes of the universal penultimate form, the good.

This requires in Socrates' method a conversion - a metanoia as Plato says sometimes. Metanoia - noia is the mental power, meta the change of the eye. Going beyond what you thought you knew. What you thought you knew how to know. Putting all of that in some sort of a parenthetical hypothesis and stepping back from it and by moving around coming to a new definition, which is based on that. But by stepping back slip into another frame of mind, another dimension of being, we literally enlarge the web of understanding which we occupy in the universe. And that this procedure, once learned, can be applied over and over again. And that we may simply, daily, grow in our understanding and intelligence. That as we do there occurs not just an arithmetical growth but a kind of a compounding of the growth of the mind. So that after so many of these kinds of experiences, one begins to see patterns which were simply unknown or invisible before. And that finally what appears is that there is an architectural meaning in the universe to which we are certainly welcome. And that if we will only employ a reasonable process of discovery it will reveal itself to us. And that in the process of our revealing it we become more and more tuned or in harmony with its purposes and its fundamental motion. And thus, we find ourselves changed, physiologically changed. And we find ourselves becoming closer to a universal than an individual.

This is two short quotations. It's a wonderful book. It's been out of print for years. Therapeia: Plato's Conception of Philosophy. They printed about 600 copies at The University North Carolina Press a long time ago. Twenty or thirty years. Its interesting. Just a paragraph.

"Once Plato's diagnosis of the human situation is understood, the way is rightly prepared for approaching his conception of the proper therapy. If existing cultural incentives are predicated upon an inverted and, hence, perverted estimate of Value and Being, it follows that it is the function of education to correct this inversion." That is a dependence on opinion or upon placing information into people from the outside. "Therefore, Plato taught that [metastrophe or periagoge] is required is as an antidote to counteract the distortion which presently warps and misdirects the soul's vision. The words for 'conversion' or 'to convert' appear at least twenty-one times in Book VII." He means The Republic. "It is a momentous revolution which Plato has in mind; And there is little possibility of understanding Plato's therapeia without full assessment of its meaning, for," And here's another Greek word - "metastrophe is the heart of the matter. Education as revolution of the 'entire soul' presupposes the accessibility of reality to the knowing mind. The faculty of cognition is designated the 'organon of knowledge.' As an instrument, it is conceived after the analogy of the eye. Plato speaks of nous as 'the eye of the soul'." I think you may have seen some of the metaphysical drawings from time to time. Robert/Roger [inaudible] used to do a thing where a human being had his eyes closed and on his forehead was kind of a [inaudible]. The inner eye. The nous.

"…and he apparently conceives the knowledge process after the analogy of direct sensible intuition. He observes, however, that in the case of the eye, vision is not inserted into it, for according to the then existing 'physiology' of sight, vision occurs when the fire in the organ of sight coalesces with light from outside the organ. Likewise, in the case of nous, 'the eye of the soul,' it is equally true that vision is neither inserted nor conveyed. The light is already in it, but the event of knowledge has subjective conditions which are not satisfied merely by the presence of available reality."

And in this process, and I am skipping over to give you another short few sentences - in this process there is a motion, an ascent. "In the light of the foregoing, we are in a better position to understand the ascending character of dialectical logic as contrasted with the descending nature of deductive logic in the abstract sciences. Dialectic, as elenchos, [inaudible]."

[inaudible] and come back to this ten years from now. [inaudible] or understand them. Don't be put off by them. And you can just see them as these as seeds of [inaudible] illuminate them all.

Dialectics that is the conversation in a specific kind of form, Socrates, Socratic form as [inaudible] says, "Examines his own assumptions or hypotheses. A procedure illustrated in every dialogue where Socrates is shown. Appraising, insisting the well or ill-considered opinions of men, respecting courage, justice, holiness, virtue, whatever the case may be."

That is to say there is constantly a motion in Plato's Dialogue in the character of Socrates in the techniques of this dialectic to create a hypothesis, to step back from it, to examine what we know among ourselves in terms of this. And to find out whether or not in that process we come to a point where we simply say this is absurd. It is not so. It could not be so. Or we come to a point where we say we don't believe what we arrived at. So that we can see that wrapped up in the hypothesis was an error, a flaw, an ignorance, which we did not know. And to go back and correct it. In certain simplistic terms, if man is a machine, man is a self-correcting machine. And the function as he does pre-eminently is to correct himself. And that correctability is a purpose that he has in his life to correct himself to perfection. Very simplistic language but perhaps it helps at this point after all these words and phrases and so forth.

Quite often instead of getting into these messes on the blackboard, all these words and so forth, Plato - wise man that he was - refused to get into this shape of understanding. And instead says through Socrates quite frequently, "let's put this aside for a moment and let's tell a story, let's tell a myth which will illustrate this." And that the myth will take the place of all this kind of meandering and investigate it. And there are some wonderful books on the uses of myths in Plato. One of the best of the ones published by the Shrine of Wisdom called The Human Soul in the Myths of Plato. Aldous Huxley devoted a lot of fortune to the Shrine of wisdom and they put out little additions of Pythagoras and Plato and Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite and so forth. This is in the [1930s]. There is another book called The Myths of Plato by J. A. Stewart - I think we have that here. J. A. Stewart The Myths of Plato.

But the purpose of myth, the mythos, the plotline, the storyline, is like the Dialogue, is like the Socratic inquiry, to put at rest that deductive critical faculty whose habitually categorizing of information gets in the way. In fact, usurps the way of natural discovering and puts in its place a kind of a sophistic parallel which we in our state - somewhere between ignorance and wisdom - mistakes for progress because we have no way of telling the difference in the process as it's happening whether it your true spiritual discovering or whether it is sophistic meandering. We have no way of telling. Hence a corollary of Plato's style of wisdom and Socrates style of inquiry that we have to do it together. That a person by themselves, unless gifted by the gods, is inadequate. We have to talk to each other. It's the only way we have. And we have to in this companionability have to be absolutely honest with ourselves and with each other. Because it is only there in the trust of companions along the way, that philosophy can actually happen and be born. There's no other way other than the gift of the gods if they so choose.

In Symposium one of the beautiful things that we find here - there's a dinner. I guess we should get to the Dialogue. There's a dinner. And invited to this meal, it's going to be at the home of Agathon, who had just won first place in Greek tragedy. The eloquent beautiful individual. Everyone that was typically there. And this Dialogue is given to us secondhand by someone who was not there but had heard the stories from someone who was there. And at this dinner, all present were to give their understanding of what love was. And progressively through these dialogues various persons who were there give their ideas. And we get everything ranging from someone who is described simply as physical, sexual love. And describes it in terms of the ideal mate. And someone who describes it in terms of - that was Pausanias, the first one. Eryximachus, the physician, describes it in terms of a kind of physiological aspiration toward the perfectability of the body and so forth. And finally, they turn to one of the great honored guests Aristophanes. Who was one of the great writers of comedy, the earliest comedy. And Aristophanes has the hiccups and cannot talk. And somebody else comes in and gives a version. Then Aristophanes gives his version of love. He says that a long time ago human beings were quite different from what they are now. That they have two backs, they had four legs and four arms. In fact, they were a couple as we would suppose them in our fond imagination today. The Gods were jealous of this. Of course, they couldn't bear to have other creatures totally happy and blissful[inaudible]. So, they cut them. And so that man finds himself halved, and spending all of one's time looking for the other half.

After this wonderful speech of Aristophanes and everyone is laughing and carrying on, Agathon delivers a very elegant kind of a speech. [inaudible] honor of his greatness with language. And he also describes love as being some sort of a god-like quality, pristine in its beauty, strong, capable and he uses a kind of language, just fantastic. And it's elegant. And let's see, he ends up saying that, "It is love who empties us of the spirit of estrangement and fills us with the spirit of kinship; who makes possible such mutual intercourse as this; who presides over festivals, dances, sacrifices; who bestows good humor and banishes surliness; whose gift is the gift of good-will and never of ill-will. He is easily entreated and of great kindness; contemplated by the wise, admired by the Gods; coveted by men who possess him not, the treasure of those who are blessed by his possession; father of Daintiness, Delicacy, Voluptuousness, all Graces, Longing, and Desire" et cetera. And ends by saying, "wherewith he casts a spell over the minds of all gods and all men."

Socrates was disgusted. [inaudible]. I mean blasted by [inaudible] of this. Coming unfairly at the tail end after all these great [inaudible] whatever could he possibly say. And in fact, he would sleep if he knew there was any place for him to go. But he would try his best if they would permit him perhaps simply to be himself. And being himself, he has to get a few issues out of the way. So, he turns to his host Agathon and says well, really Agathon, I really know very little about this. [inaudible] his ignorance to know that he does not know. And this is unheard of because then there are other things that he may not know. What is it that he knows that permits him to know that he does not know? Well, he has a broad perspective of methods and features available to him at all times.

And he says, "My dear sir, how can I fail to be at a loss? How could anyone who had to speak after so splendid and varied an oration as that which we have just heard? The early part of it was not so remarkable as the rest, I know, but a beauty of the words and phrases in that passage at the end would have taken anyone's breath away. For my part, when I reflected that I should not be able to come anywhere near that standard of eloquence," why I want to flee. I felt that with a great orator who would somehow use a Gorgon's head and reduce me to stone and speechless.

And then he says, allow me "to ask Agathon [just] a few questions, small question, so that I might obtain his agreement before I begin my speech." So, Socrates says "I was very much struck by your introductory passage my dear Agathon, where you said that the right thing was first to describe the actual nature of the god, and afterwards to demonstrate the effects which he produces. I like that way of beginning very much. But I should be grateful if you would supplement your otherwise splendid and magnificent account of Love's nature by answering this question." And he goes on to say, isn't love always "love of something." One doesn't simply say 'love' it's always 'love of'. You love your father. And you love your mother. Isn't love always a relationship? And they allow that this is true [inaudible].

And then he says, it occurred to me to say that love is [inaudible] That it seems to me that love is always needing, wanting something that it does not possess. If possessed, it would have no need to desire it. it would have it. So is love not really the lack of beauty, strength, etc. and he spins it out. And finally, he says, well it seems that we have a problem here today. That love is in fact something quite different from what we've been exposed to. And that all of our thinking has somehow approached this in the wrong way. That we discover nothing except the fact that we can tell exactly what we're doing are nothing about love. And if you allow [inaudible] I was instructed by a woman from a little town who I kind of love. And I have I think very good conversations with her. Because I too at one time how [inaudible] the same opinion about how she felt about love. And permit me relate to how she instructed me.

And so, Socrates relates, and this is his method. He relates what he knows in a dialogue. He never comes out this [inaudible] it's always set up so that as durational time goes on more and more elements of a form began to occur. Until it's almost impossible to ignore that in the mind of the holder, the mind of the listener that the gestalt that's being portrayed before you, occurs. So that long before Socrates draws the conclusions you yourself would draw the conclusion. In colloquial words you know damn well what he would say because you already figured it out. He'd like a detective who's laid all the facts of the case out. You know who's guilty. And you just almost impatient that hasn't got on with it and get you [inaudible]. But Socrates [inaudible] and he says that love is always a middle ground state. It is never wisdom. It is never ignorant. And that in fact, the person who is in love or is a lover is always someone who is in this quandary of being suspended between wanting to know the real truth and not being so ignorant as to not know that there is something to know. And that such a person who persists in pursuing this becomes a philosopher. A lover of wisdom. Because the very process of recognizing over and over again that one is always in the middle, that we haven't changed to the absolute of wisdom in any area whatsoever in life. We increasingly find ourselves [inaudible] as being suspended somewhere in the universe. And our location can be identified by the fact that it's always in between ignorance and knowing. And that the lover is [inaudible] because he will not give up. Will not, not be a lover. Always want to know. Keeps the desire to know alive. And by constantly running against the unknown and the unknowing in all areas, slowly defines his real position in the world as being someone for whom ignorance could never be a refuge. Wisdom cannot be attained. And so, he is left with the process. With the method. What's going on.

And that as he says here, "Well, if you believe that the natural object of love is what we have more than once agreed [that it is], the answer will not surprise you. The same argument holds good in the animal world as in the human, and mortal nature seeks, as far as may be, to perpetuate itself and become immortal," because only at this final quest for immortality can this process go on indefinitely. So that finally an equality that emerges out of the love of wisdom out of this wonderful dinner party and Socrates, is that the questing for immortality, a wisdom which would be synonymous with immortality, is finally at the bottom of the whole issue. And that the lover is one who expects that that is somehow solved. Knows this to be true. Does not know though how it is true for one. And that he is not ignorant nor null but simply suspended in between.

"The man who would pursue the right way to this goal," as they say, must begin when they are young and apply themselves just at that time simply "to the contemplation of physical beauty, and, if he is properly directed by his guide, he will first fall in love with one particular beautiful person and beget noble sentiments in partnership" and so forth. "Later he will observe that physical beauty in any person is closely akin to the physical beauty in any other, and that, if he is to make beauty of outward form the object of his quest, it is great folly not to acknowledge that the beauty exhibited in all bodies is one and the same; when he has reached this conclusion he will become a lover of all physical beauty, and will relax the intensity of his passion for one particular person," or for people, and "he will realize that such a passion is beneath him and of small account. The next stage is for him to reckon beauty of the soul more valuable than beauty of body; the result will be that, when he encounters a virtuous soul in a body which has little of the bloom of beauty, he will be content to love and cherish it and to bring forth such notions as may serve to make young people better; in this way he will be compelled to contemplate beauty as it exists in activities and institutions," architecture, sculpture, [inaudible] whatever it is. That the love of you, questing for ultimate and an immortal form of understanding, the eternal good. That this question leads us from the observation of individual persons or just people, to see that any kind of parentheses as it were. As being only a small portion of the true picture. And that as we mature and our vision matures of fantastic differentiation on the one hand and synthesizing our form on the other. Through this dialectic of inquiry that we begin to note more and more that all of the forms of light and dark in nature exhibit the same principle and allow us to investigate in the same way. So that, "from morals he must be directed to the sciences and contemplate their beauty also, so that, having his eyes fixed upon beauty in the widest sense, he may no longer be the slave of a base and mean-spirited devotion to," mean examples of beauty, "but, by gazing upon the vast ocean of beauty to which his attention is now turned, may bring forth in the abundance of his love of wisdom." He loves to see then many beautiful and magnificent ideas. "Until at last, strengthened and increased in stature by this experience, he catches sight of one unique science whose object is the beauty of which I'm about to speak. And here I must ask you to pay the closest possible attention."

This is the fulcrum at which the Symposium [inaudible] Socrates makes him at [inaudible]. "The man who has been guided thus far in the mysteries of love, and who has directed his thoughts towards examples of beauty in due and orderly succession, will suddenly have revealed to him as he approaches the end of his initiation a beauty whose nature is marvelous indeed, the final goal of all his previous efforts. This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; [next] it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part," but in the whole. Not ugly. It's not "corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking" in its order.

This quest is discovery of the nirvanic state beyond the mind, beyond the capacities of experience. Beyond the process of self-reflecting parentheses of order. [inaudible] and the discovery is phenomenal.

Well, Plato is a very wise man and does not leave us on this grand wonderful end. And the Symposium follows through and gives us like a true artist gives us a coda to bring us back to the [inaudible] bring us back from the top of Mount Everest, put a staff into a thesis base camp with a glass of hot rum and [inaudible] so that we may leave it not shocked by expectation or mystified by its potential. But rather may come full circle back some human place where we may freely put it down, turn away and walk away from it. And hopefully come back to it again some other day.

So [inaudible] in the Symposium introduces the figure of Alcibiades first into the party, drunk as all get-out. The bunch of friends [inaudible] playing the flute. Alcibiades tells them all to sit down at the table and [inaudible] let me sit down here [inaudible]. And he jumped up in the table because who is sitting next to him but Socrates. And this is how Plato describes it. And this is right after this beautiful, incredible, refined insight of the ultimate reality experience. [inaudible] the first time in Western thought this mysticism has been put into a cultural form.

And he says, "'Take off Alcibiades' shoes,' ordered Agathon, 'so that he can put his feet up and make a third at this table.' 'Splendid,' says Alcibiades, 'but who is our table companion?' With these words he twisted himself round and saw Socrates, then leapt to his feet and said: 'Good God, what have we here? Socrates? Lying there in wait for me again? How like you to make a sudden appearance just when I least expect to find you. What are you doing here? And why have you taken this place? You ought to be next to Aristophanes or some other actual or would-be buffoon, and instead you've managed to,'" be right next to me. Sit next to me [inaudible] You see everyone has been quote [inaudible] just outside of [inaudible]. How one time he tried to lure Socrates into a situation of [inaudible] to see if he really was a philosopher. And see if he couldn't just get Socrates to make some kind of a social swap. He did not. And Alcibiades on top of it all he kept me up all night talking about philosophy and I felt like a complete fool. Me the most eloquent man in Athens. And the dawn came he simply walked out of my house and instead of going to sleep even then walked down to the forum and spent the whole day arguing with other people.

END OF RECORDING