Classics

This essay analyzes Plato's views of love and beauty in the  Symposium.  It examines the literary aspects of the dialogue and discusses the cultural context in which the symposium took place.  It sets forth the norms for homosexual relationships in ancient Athens.  It examines the key speeches in the text and their different conceptions of love.  It analyzes Plato's notion of "metaphysical desire."  It discusses the reception of Plato's Symposium and its theory of love in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and secular writers in later periods.

This essay examines Plato's "aesthetics of extravagance" in his accounts of the beautiful "variegation" of natural phenomena in the Phaedo eschatology and in the movements of the stars in the Timaeus.  In the former text, Plato focuses on the beauty of the variegated interaction of colors in the "aethereal" realm; in the latter, he describes the collective movements of the stars as a variegated "dance."  Here, Plato borrows and deviates from the practice of choral dances at religious festivals.  In festival choral dances, the music, poetic words, and dance motions conjure up multiple referents even as they invite the viewer to "unite" with the god.  For the viewer of the star-dance in Plato, the philosopher "unites" with a rational god by seeing the "star dance" as pointing to a single referent:  the "nous" of the divine world-soul that moves the stars.  I contrast these accounts of Plato's "extravagant aesthetics" to the "minimalist aesthetics" set forth in the Philebus.

In the Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, Plato posits the existence of the forms and an immortal soul:  he places both in the realm of being, not becoming.  We find a very different scenario in the Symposium.  Diotima describes a soul/mind that fluctuates, ages, and dies.  While she affirms the theory of the forms, she does not posit an immortal soul.  Indeed, the soul does not stay the same over time (208a-b).  A person does not even maintain his hold on knowledge (epistêmê) as he ages.  He must ongoingly learn new things in order to “implant a new piece of knowledge” in place of the one that has departed (208a).  Diotima places great weight on the changing and fluxuating soul, using discourse that we associate with the body and the realm of becoming.  These changing and finite humans desire ongoing goodness and immortality.  However, mortals can only achieve immortality through genesis--by “giving birth” to new things that will carry on one’s lineage after they die (207d).  These offspring may be children, poems, laws, or (in the case of the philosophers) virtues, fine discourses, and ideas (dianoêmata) (210d).  We have, then, a theory that features a fluctuating and finite soul that can nonetheless contemplate the everlasting forms.  Can a soul that dwells in the realm of becoming grasp and apprehend Being?  If we reject this position, then we must ask (again) whether Diotima’s account is truly Platonic.  If not, then how do we interpret her speech?

This discusses the ways that human artifacts have come from the natural world move back into it (or not, as in the case of plastics) over time.  It uses Homer's notion of "nostos" or "homecoming" to analyze the artifact's "homecoming" in the humic realm.

NOTE:  this is the final copy of this essay (please ignore earlier, proof copy.  This focuses on Plato's conception of reading and writing in the Phaedrus and the Laws; it also examines Isocrates' "Panathenaicus," which offers a response to Plato on this topic.  This paper is in Peponi, ed., "Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws"