Platonic love, Plato's 'code' and Paul's sexual liberation
By Mark Vernon on Saturday, August 20 2011, 07:10 - Philosophers - Permalink
'Platonic love', to Plato, does not mean friends breath a sigh of relief because they share no erotic entanglements. Friends, you fool yourselves, he believes. Rather, it means sublimating the erotic energy between two people to pursue not each other, but together, life itself.
This much is clear from, say, a read of the Phaedrus, and it is handy that Jay Kennedy's analysis of the musical patterns embedded in Plato's Symposium confirm that Plato was not against human love, as the view associated with the scholar Gregory Vlastos has it, but wished to channel it. (I see that Kennedy is still 'cracking the Plato code' and discovering 'hidden doctrines', which is good marketing, won lots of headlines last year, I hear secured a big book deal and Holywood interest because it is fun, in a Dan Brown way - and like Brown, wildly overplays the hand.)
'Plato divided each of his writings into 12 parts,' Kennedy explains, 'inserting a symbol marking a musical note at each twelfth. At harmonious notes he placed positive ideas such as love and goodness, while at dissonant notes he placed negative ideas such as rejection, quarrelling and evil.' In the Symposium, comments about trading sex for favour or advantage are placed at dissonant notes; expressions of erotic love's abiding desire for another's soul are placed at harmonious notes.
Platonic love is, in fact, a notion of relatively recent invention. Kennedy continues: 'At the beginning of the modern era, women cleverly used Plato’s reputation as a genius to get men to pay attention to their minds. Platonic love was an argument for not settling down and allowing women to participate in arts and culture in the royal court. When sex often meant an early death, Plato was a licence for having more fun.'
Which also goes to show that historic attitudes towards sex are more subtle and inventive than we moderns, so proud of our free attitudes towards love, can allow them to be. This came out in Will Self's review of Catherine Kakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. He notes that for Hakim 'Christian monogamy' is just a strategy to ensure that all men, who are more ugly on average, get a woman, who are more beautiful.
Except that, if anything, the Biblical imperative is not for monogamy but for not marrying at all. As Peter Brown shows in his brilliant The Body and Society, when Jesus discouraged marriage by example (sorry Dan) and Paul by teaching, they encouraged a practice that was liberating for women, for whom marriage - like medieval sex - often meant early death.
It was also socially disruptive, because women, on average, had to have quite a few children by quite a young age, just to preserve population levels.
Comments
Dear Mark Vernon, thanks for your post on my recent Plato book. I think you were the first to cover it in the UK -- even before the newspapers.
I'm fortunate there is so much interest in this research. It's a reflection of how important Plato still is to us. The exciting thing for me is that the publicity led scholars around the world to take a look at the evidence, and interest has taken off quickly.
I've lectured at a half-dozen universities. There will be two workshops or mini-conferences on this work in the Autumn. Now a dozen top scholars are contributing to a collected volume debating these issues. My new book amplifies the evidence many times over. In hindsight, it seems natural that a Plato would structure his works with musical 'forms' below the surface narrative.
Now, after years of work, the character of Plato's scheme has been laid bare and the question is: what more will we learn about the birth of Western thought, science, and perhaps even love from Plato's symbols? I'll look forward to your judgement on all this. Jay
Hi, Charles Myro here,
On the other hand, in one of the Gospels Jesus says, presumably speaking of marriage, (in paraphrase)---what God has joined let no man rend asunder---in other words, stay married. If marriage were so negative to Jesus, why such a statement?
My understanding is that there were many women who were leaders of the early church before women were finally excluded from any church leadership-- though they still made lovely martyrs, of course.
I really don't think the church was a liberator of women;
Just new wine in old bottles--variation on the same misogyny; if it hadn't been for Eve, we wouldn't be in this unholy mess and so on.
How many women turned celibate and unmarried by Christ's or Paul's or even St. Anthony's example? A rich woman could afford it---but who else? In the early church there were no nunneries.
Augustine's mom was a devout Christian and friend of Ambrose---but she birthed Augustine. Is there some conflict there with her Christianity? Most women still want to have children and in this I see no conflict with religion nor with women's rights.
Only second class status, ill-treatment within marriage and high infant mortality were the problems--and Christianity certainly was no remedy for those.
I have had woman friends I credit with brilliant minds and mutual sex attraction was minimal so we remained "Platonic". Still, these women were waiting for a romantic potential partner and when they found him they were lost to me.
Perhaps you underestimate the intensity of desire in most women to have children while they can. I think most women do not equate liberation with the option to
forgo childbearing.
Jay - Thanks for putting up with my code jibes, but I honestly wonder what new content - not emphasis - the harmonics reveal? The 'hidden doctrines' are surely there to read. Mark
Mark, it turns out that the dialogues are as dense with symbolism as Dante or Spencer. The new book has
a chapter called 'extracting doctrine from structure' and shows that we learn quite a lot of new doctrine from
the musical symbolism. Just as his ancient followers insisted, Plato hid a Pythagorean philosophy beneath the
surface conversations in his writings. These are heady claims. Thus the wide academic debate. Which side will you take? Jay
I incline with you, for sure, and look forward to reading your book, only I see Pythagorean ideas on the surface or very close to the surface, not hidden - in anything from analogies/allusions like that of the divided line, through the deployment of clearly religious motifs like myths, to the notion of forming an academy as a kind of neo-Pythagorean community. So the problem, I suspect, is not that doctrines are hidden but that they are missed or poorly interpreted - inasmuch as Plato has doctrines at all, of course - though I certainly hope your work helps shift things by drawing attention to your hermeneutical device.
I wonder if part of the problem with the issue of love as a key theme in Plato, say, and the way that has been interpreted in the 20th century, is the homosexual aspect: it was just too embarrassing mid-20th century to take the figure and function of, say, Hippothales in the Lysis seriously, because he is gripped by a homosexual infatuation. But we're getting over that now.
Also, there is the way that Plato's Republic was interpreted through colonial eyes: I think Julia Annas has written about the way that the Republic was read as a kind of fantasy politics, akin to More's Utopia, to draw out the problems of politics until the British empire needed foundation documents, when it started to be read almost as a manifesto. This meant that lots of the mythical material, for example, is read wrongly too.
Mark, thanks, yes, there are many Pythagorean themes in the dialogues. Surprisingly, the experts on early Pythagoreanism like Burkert and Huffman argue that Plato was not, however, influenced by Pythagoras (ch. 1 of the book). But I agree with your view, and perhaps we can swing the pendulum back again. I'm away next week ... Jay