What's Love got to do with it?

Passion, then, is an incorrigible element of fine teaching.

Let us say passion or love and mean eros (we can haggle about semantics at a later time if we must). I have just re-read Plato’s Symposium for faculty orientation and thus have been contemplating love and its role in education.

And here I must offer warning in true Socratic fashion: I am in no way an authority on this text. It is my third time to read it and first with this specific slant. In what follows, there will be much halting and several uncomfortable moments of indecision. But as this is a mere blog post, I hope that I shall lose little sleep over ineptitude and that you will forgive me for it beforehand.

Like an Aristotelian drama, the Symposium has a beginning, middle, and an end. The beginning consists of the introduction to the twice-removed dialogue and the first five speeches made in honor of Love (eros). The speech-givers are supposed to proceed according to their seating arrangement. After the second speech, though, that order is upset, and to good and insightful purposes, I think.

The first speech-giver is young and bright Phaedrus. His speech in honor of Love is a literary one. His thesis is that love inspires great deeds and prevents shameful ones, but to back his claim, he calls upon mythological sources. By citing the deeds of heroes and the gods’ goodwill such deeds earned them as proofs, Phaedrus thus buries a promising notion amid a flurry of flowery allusions without much investigation.

The second speech-giver is older Pausanias. His speech echoes with tinny legalism. He introduces a distinction between common and heavenly eros and then uses that distinction to too-neatly divvy up love. On the common side is lust and heterosexual love, engaged in by the vulgar and condoned by those cultures with primitive customs. On the heavenly side is homosexual love and Athens.

The third speech-giver is supposed to be the comic Aristophanes but due to a coincidentally timed hiccup-fit, Dr. Eryximachus takes his place. Eryximachus’ thesis is that love is significantly broader than his fellow speakers have allowed. Medicine, farming, meteorology, astronomy, music and divination are all the “science of love on…insert appropriate subject matter here…” And thus is Eryximachus’ scientific account of love.

The now-fourth speech-giver is the newly-cured Aristophanes. His speech seems a throw-back to the lost field of natural philosophy. He says that we must first look to human nature to understand love. For humans, once two as a whole now split and lacking our natural partner, love is seeking our other half. Love is making whole wounded human nature.

Let us examine the progression: first, a literary account, built on stories and mythological citations; second, a legalistic account, drawing from customs and laws; third, a scientific account, utilizing one broad pragmatic example after another; fourth, a naturalistic account, set upon the inherent nature of human loving. I do see a progression here, a sort of genealogy of human intellectual endeavors. It seems also a progression which our students undergo. Beginning with stories, fables, myths; growing to see the morals (in an Aesopian sense) extrapolated from said stories applied; broadening then their notion of their place in the wide world; then turning inward to figure out their inborn nature and the ramifications of that nature.

So we arrive at Agathon’s speech with appetites whetted and feet eager for the next step. Agathon, the triumphant tragic-poet, begins his speech with an exciting promise: he is going to leave off talking about the effects of love, the powers of love, the instances of love. No no, he is going to talk about what love is. (Can you not see Socrates salivating at the words “ti esti”?)

And then he doesn’t.

And Socrates gets mad.

But that’s ok because Socrates does give us what we’re wanting. He tells us what love is: Love is pursuit of the Good and one loves by giving birth in beauty in both body and soul. His account is, of course, philosophical, turning on the absolute and perfect Forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. And so for our students, the final step, after the stories and morals and science and human nature, the final step is to become little lovers of wisdom.

This means we, as teachers, need to make whatever the students are learning so irresistibly beautiful that they cannot but desire it, cannot but let it germinate, and cannot but at last give birth in beauty, thereby pursuing the good.

Every human intellectual pursuit, be it literature, law, science, or psychology (in the good ole’ Greek sense of the word), should be toward the end of engendering lovers of wisdom and thus pursuers of good.

I haven’t sufficiently thought about the end of the Symposium, but if I do, I will let you know.