Hot Socrates

Is gazing into your lover's eyes the first step towards philosophical enlightenment?

When my colleague, Allegra Forbes, suggested In Medias Res do something for Valentine’s Day, I imagined a modern-day Symposium, a gathering of love-obsessed Classicists agreeing to drink in moderation, and then offering a speech in turn on love. We could even invite a scribe to write up the highlights. Well, maybe next year. For this year, as a fall back, I asked a couple of esteemed Classicists to write a few words on why Plato’s Symposium still matters, and has things to teach us about love and sex. Overjoyed at the possibility of writing without footnotes (Socrates would have been pleased!) I’m happy to report that Kirk Ormand and Joy Connolly took up the challenge, and I even, very belatedly, added a thought or two of my own. So Valentine’s Day may have come and gone, but at least it’s Spring, when, as Catullus says, our eager souls long to wander, and our feet get twitchy, which, as a more contemporary voice might tell us, is "nature, that’s all / simply telling us to fall in love." So here, for now, are the ‘speeches’, unrolled slowly one by one, and let’s hope we do it next year in person. With wine.

– Mark Buchan, Editor of In Medias Res

You’re at a bar in muted light, and have had a drink or two. You gaze across the table (slightly sticky from spilled beer) into your cute friend’s eyes, and find yourself captivated by their laugh. Their eyes are duskier than usual, and they seem to be looking at you with a new kind of interest. Suddenly you catch yourself. What is happening here? Are you falling in love? According to Socrates (at least as he’s presented in Plato’s Symposium), congratulations! You’ve just taken the first step towards philosophical enlightenment. Indeed, Socrates somewhat surprisingly declares that the true object of all erotic desire, even yours, is the production of works of intellection.

Socrates comes to this conclusion after a series of logical enough steps, known to students of the dialogue as the “ladder of love.” It’s a progression of ever-more abstract realizations: the attraction towards one hot youth will lead a man to recognize the beauty of youths in general (Plato nearly always assumes that the desiring subject is male, and the Greeks fetishized youth); from there, if he’s the right sort of lover, he will come to recognize that the beauty of all bodies is the same, regardless of the body. This realization will lead to appreciation of beauty of the mind, which will lead to the beauty of customs and institutions. (Plato begins to lose me here, but never mind.) From institutions the lover recognizes the beauty of different types of knowledge, and now it’s just a hop, skip and jump to “gaze upon the limitless ocean of beauty” which inspires the lover to produce…philosophical discourse.

Um… right. I guess?

What I find fascinating about Socrates, though, is not his insistence that eros leads to embiggening of the soul (to paraphrase Jebediah Springfield), but rather the moments in which this hero of abstract thought seems subject to the same butterflies in the stomach as the rest of us. In a dialogue called the Charmides, we are introduced to an Athenian youth who is so smokin’ that he stops traffic when he walks into the room. Even young men–normally the objects of desire–are attracted to him. Socrates, making his usual move, suggests to the man sitting next to him that the thing that would make Charmides unparalleled would be “if he also happens to have a well-formed soul.” But when Charmides comes over and sits next to him, Socrates becomes a hot mess. They’re surrounded by other men, who are joshing and joking and watching, but all that falls away: “…when everyone surged around us in a circle, I saw inside his cloak and caught on fire and was quite beside myself. And it occurred to me that Cydias was the wisest love poet when he said that “‘the fawn should take care; while taking a look at the lion, he might provide part of the lion’s dinner.’” And Socrates goes on to say that in this moment he feels as if he has been captured “by just such a beast.” Yowsa.

Why should Socrates be subject to such moments? What are they for? In still another dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates provides some insight. Desire, it turns out, is a way to see yourself from outside yourself. In this dialogue, desire is something that is transferred through the eyes, reciprocally. A man looks at the youth whom he desires, and his desire enters the young man’s soul through the eyes; the young man does not fully understand what’s happening, but experiences a returning desire himself. And perhaps most importantly, “he does not realize that he is seeing himself in the lover as in a mirror.” Which is to say, the stomach-wrenching pangs of desire come about not just when we see a beautiful person, but when we see ourselves through the eyes of the one we desire, and realize that he/she/they is looking at us as desirable. They’re hot because they see us as hot, and vice versa.

And that, for me, rings true; when I’ve had those moments of being smacked down with desire, it’s often accompanied by the realization that the person who’s looking at me (with desire) is far more beautiful than I first realized. Call it narcissism if you like, call it selfish, and maybe it won’t ever lead me to genuine philosophical insight. But as Socrates suggests, the experience of gazing at someone who seems inclined to gaze at you, of becoming a hot mess as the world drops away for a few moments, is nourishing for the soul.