Socrates Without Cushions

On Love and Discomfort in the Symposium.

Socrates not only talks about desire, or ‘erotics’ in the Symposium, he acts it out. He shows up at the party unfashionably late, and makes himself the center of attention; that is, he provokes the guests to want him in his absence. He’s late because he is lost in thought, or so he claims, and Agathon immediately sends a slave to fetch him. But Aristodemos is on to Socrates’ game. He tells Agathon that granting him all this attention won’t work; you have to leave Socrates alone. The trick, then, is not to show Socrates how much you want him, but to turn the tables. 

The Symposium is about interpreting not only what Socrates says, but what he does. Even more important is what he doesn’t do. The drunken Alcibiades tells of his efforts to seduce Socrates. Finally he gets him alone, late at night, throws his cloak over him and clings to him naked. But nothing happens. Why? One answer would offer a Socrates somehow beyond the physical act of sex, and interested only in less tangible matters. I’m less sure. What if his lack of sexual intervention is Alcibiades-specific? That is, he doesn’t have sex with Alcibiades because Alcibiades has the wrong idea about sex, and giving in would confirm it.

Alcibiades hopes to exchange his physical charms for the more enigmatic, puzzling charms of Socrates, and Socrates quickly dismisses this as an exchange of ‘bronze for gold.’ But the deeper problem is Alcibiades’ transactional approach to erotics which both allows the game to be played on Alcibiades’ terms (the basic currency is the value of his physical beauty), and allows him to be comfortable, smugly ‘sufficient to himself’. And so we have the first lesson from this dialogue. Don’t treat love (or sex) in such a way that confirms your own narrow worldview. Instead, like a gadfly, let love shake you out of your complacency. What matters is less the lack of sex on the couch, and more the thoughts in Alcibiades’ head Socrates was trying to stir up, as he lay all night in chaste silence.

Another anti-sex interlocutor can perhaps clarify the point. When Socrates meets the aging Cephalus in the first book of the Republic, he claims not to miss sex (he quotes Sophocles, who says old age frees him from the raging love-demon), and instead is at peace in the realm of discourse and philosophy. This is perhaps fine in theory, but in actuality he lives a thoroughly conventional life. He believes justice is ‘paying back what one owes’, and, conveniently, he has the money to do it. This spills over into his views on death. Rather than view this event (as with sex) as an event that should force us to confront the depths of our ignorance, he rushes to his rituals, tied up in his creature comforts. When Socrates starts to question him about his implied theory of justice, he runs away. Giving up on the terrorizing love-god has its consequences.

His complacency can explain a curious pun offered by Plato when Socrates meets Cephalus. He is sitting, wreathed, on a fancy chair and cushion: ἐπί τινος προσκεφαλαίου τε καὶ δίφρου. A cushion, a thing next to the head, reminds us of his name,  whose meaning itself hints at the heart of the matter, the crux (κεφαλαίοv). Cephalus’ complacency protects him confronting inconvenient truths, as a cushion creates a comfort that helps us forget our vulnerabilities, not least our mortality. So lesson number two: try to use love or sex (or the prospect of death) to tarry with what’s uncomfortable.

These Socratic ideas are with us today; in every romcom, when someone rich falls in love with a pauper and confronts the meaningless of his money. And what is a ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ if not a modern erotic gadfly, pricking the aging, complacent representatives of our persistent patriarchy to change their ways? As for sex, do we not instinctively know the romcom story is over when the central couple exchange sex in the kitchen for sex in the comfort of the bed? There are plenty of cultural whispers telling us Socrates was right. Yet as a society, like Alcibiades, we crawl back to the familiar. So in honor of the love-god, perhaps we should be open to sex, and love, in such a way that rocks our world. Without cushions.