Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

It was in rereading this first book that ideas started forming for what I wanted to write about for my paper topic. Aristotle will talk a lot throughout Ethics about the Good, what it is to man, and how man achieves it. When I first read Nicomachean Ethics last semester, I thought it was odd that Aristotle would frame this discussion with mentions of politics at the beginning and end of Ethics. But in rereading it and looking at the translator’s notes, I realized that I had a misconstrued interpretation of what Aristotle meant by politics, so I went back to look at what the translator had to say since he has knowledge of both the Greek and English languages (surprise! It’s a little sad that it took me the second time reading this to look it up).

So here it is: Politike is the science of the city-state (polis) and the members of it. It is not constrained to our narrow “political science” sense of the word, but also in the sense that a civilized human existence is only possible in the polis. Therefore, politike involves not only politics as a science of the state, but our concept of society as well.

 

So what does this mean in the context of serving as the opening and closing framework of Ethics? This is part of what I will be exploring in my paper, but if I had to make a preliminary guess… Society, or any form of community really, is necessary for man to reach the highest good. Man flourishes within the structure of community because he is able to put into practice much of the things the Aristotle discusses throughout Nicomachean Ethics. This is why Aristotle devotes an entire book to the importance of friends, because that is another form of community in which man can flourish and grow. (This is a little rough in terms of accuracy and depth, but writing a blog post about it has helped solidify ideas about what I want to write about.)

Symposium: The Five Speeches

As a means of review for myself I’m going back to the five speeches:

Phaedrus says that Love is the oldest of all gods. He claims that “because of his antiquity, Love is the source of our greatest benefits.” This is because love is the inspiration of honor and virtue and is the spirit of self-sacrifice. (In part because a man would rather die than appear as a coward in the eyes of his beloved.)

Pausanias distinguishes between heavenly love and common love.  The object of common love is women and young boys; the object of heavenly love is young men. He advocates laws to rule the proper way to love in society. He thinks that love is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for either depending on the actions behind it.

Euryximachus is a physician. He makes the distinction the distinction of bad and good love (balance and harmony) into a cosmic principle and ergo universally applicable. He says love is everywhere and is the driving force behind everything. This definition acts as a transition from the narrow definition of love as physical desire (Phaedrus and Pausanias) to the intellectual love.  As a physician he speaks of the healthy and the ill and advises from a foundation of practice.  

Ariststophanes is a comic playwright and tells a humorous tale to frame his account of love. He defines love as the "desire and pursuit of the whole”.  He recognizes that love is a need whose satisfaction is more than physical and that love is a longing to regain a lost happiness.  

Agathon is a tragic poet who gives the party. His contribution is the admission that love's object is Beauty. He says love is the force of bringing things together. Unlike Phaedrus, he believes love is the youngest god. 

Symposium: Socrates' Speech

This is a short account of Socrates’ speech on love (or rather, his retelling of a conversation he had with Diotima on the subject).

Socrates argues that love or desire is relational and expresses lack or deficiency. If love is love of some object, then love desires that object. One desires only what one does not have, so love is not beautiful but is desire of beauty.

Socrates then tells how Diotima described the nature of love. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor evil. He is an intermediate state—half man, half god. He is like opinion (Intermediate between ignorance and episteme). He is the true lover of wisdom because wisdom is beautiful and beauty is the object of love. Men are lovers of the good which they want to possess perpetually. Perpetuity is achieved through procreation. Thus, Eros is procreation: physical, spiritual and philosophical (that of wisdom).

The correct way to begin to love is to love beautiful bodies, ideally he should start with loving just one body. Next, he will reduce the love of a single body and appreciate the beauty of all beautiful bodies. Then he should reduce the love of beautiful bodies to love the beauty of minds. Next is to find beauty in laws, observances and kinship and to let go of the beauty of bodies altogether. Then he will find beauty in the forms of knowledge (general not particular branches). Finally, he will be “turned towards the great sea of beauty and gazing on it he’ll give birth, through a boundless love of knowledge, to many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas.” 

It is in this way that “when someone goes up these stages, through loving boys in the correct way, and begins to catch sight of that beauty, he has come close to reaching the goal.”

Symposium

Since I had already finished reading Symposium over spring break, I had the time to do some extra reading in the introduction provided in my copy of the book. I found a few interesting things to consider as I continue to look at this dialogue. For starters, here is some background information on this piece. The banquet did occur; Xenophon reports on it as well as Plato.  Agathon had won first prize for his dramatic play and guests were invited back to the house for a party. A symposium is literally a "drinking together"--in other words a drinking party. This is unlike Plato’s other dialogues in that Socrates does not question the others in the dialectical fashion as seen in Plato’s other works, except briefly. Instead the various speakers take turns, as it were, each offering what he knows from his own perspective and then Socrates presents a view that can place the others within a grander scheme.

This is the part that I found most interesting: the dialogue centers on a series of speeches praising eros, a term usually translated as ‘desire’. Eros is the name for one of the Greek gods of love (we would be more familiar with the Romanized name, Cupid), which lends to the definition of the term eros a ‘passionate sexual desire’. So why do we get the translation ‘love’ instead of desire? In the words of Christopher Gill, whom I have to thank for this introduction in my book, “Some of the speeches, especially Socrates’, suggest that sexual desire is an expression of certain deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.” This actually helped me a lot to understand how Socrates’ speech fits in with the speeches at the beginning. A wide range of definitions of love were explored, but Socrates says “first, that Love is of something; second, that it is of something that he currently needs” (Plato, 200e). The initial accounts of love weren’t necessarily incompatible with that of Socrates’, but the different views of love they gave were just facets of what Gills calls “deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.”

Allegory of the Cave... Continued?

I first read Plato’s allegory of the cave last semester, and now I seem to see allusions to it in much of what I read for other classes. For example, in Dante’s Pradisio, Dante the pilgrim uses much of the same language as Plato in describing his quest for understanding of the ultimate truth (or what Plato called the Good, as represented by the sun in his allegory). I’ll focus this comparison in canto two of Paradisio.

As he sets off on his journey across the Ocean of Being, the pilgrim warns those that would take the same path: “Don’t try the open ocean—turn and see your own familiar shores, for you’d remain forever lost, should you lose sight of me. I venture across waters never sailed by man!” (Dante, Parad 2.4-7). Just like the prisoner freed from his chains and compelled to embark on a journey upward, the pilgrim must go on a journey that few men ever attempt on their own. The pilgrim foresees that it will be challenging and at times painful to leave his shore of familiarity.

We follow the pilgrim on his journey out of his ‘cave’ as his preconceived notions are challenged and his intellect is stretched. Finally he reaches the point when he “saw [he]’d reached a place that turned [his] sight toward something to behold in awe” (Dante, Parad 2.25-26). This is the moment when he sees what Plato calls the sun in his allegory, just like the prisoner led out of the cave who has his gaze turned towards the sun. Dante describes the moment as “struck by the warming sun, what underlies snow is denuded of the cold and white, so now—yourself remaining what you are—I wish to fill your intellect with light, light so aflame with life that cannot cease” (Dante, Parad 2.106-110). The snow is water stripped of the accidental features of white and coldness. Likewise, upon beholding the light, the intellect is so filled and enlightened that it experiences true and unveiled life in its purest/simplest state and not hidden behind the walls of the cave.