Plato’s Humanity: Utopian, Eroticist

Hey y'all,

We're back again at Hogshead. Tanner is hosting this meeting with a discussion on Plato.

Here's the write-up that will orient the discussion for this upcoming event:

Bubbles, pictured above in Canadian director Clattenburg’s Trailer Park Boys, is likely the greatest television character of all time simply for recognizing the transcendent value of Plato’s writing. While the remainder of the show doesn’t recognize Plato in any explicit sense, it’s my inclination to believe that these fictional Nova Scotians are living out the class structure laid out in Plato’s Republic by embracing their low-life identities. The priority, for them, is to get drunk and eat chicken fingers. Plato cheers them on.

Anyone who has ever complained about the state of society and designed something they thought to be better follows in the tradition begun by the first extant utopist, Plato. He lived at a time when Athenian democracy was shaken by demagogues like Alcibiades and Lysander, reverting power into the hands of tyrants (antiquity’s term for fascists). The origin of political turmoil was at the forefront of Plato’s experience, and is laid out in historians like Thucydides and Xenophon. The Republic is concerned with the unchanging society, one which having reached a zenith, would never need to adjust the structure of its institutions. Such a society might, according to Plato, be perfectly just.

Rachel Menken, Jewish department store owner in TV’s Mad Men, is likely the second greatest television character of all time for reminding us in Season 1, Episode 6’s Babylon that the Ancient Greeks “had two words for [utopia]. Eu-topos, meaning ‘the good place.’ And u-topos, meaning ‘the place that cannot be.’” Amidst New York City’s modern day Babylon, she will eventually return to Don Draper in a dream to tell him he has missed his chance at living with the love of his life. “You’ve missed your flight,” she says. Whether Plato meant this Republic literally, that is, to have it enacted in reality, defying u-topos, in Athens, has been debated since its 4th century B.C.E. inception.

Yet Plato was not concerned only with justice. He was also concerned with eroticism, and we see this in other dialogues like Charmides, Phaedrus, Lysis, and The Symposium. Here questions are posed concerning temperance, the value of erotic love, and what love is more generally. All valuable questions, yes, but why were they not posed in The Republic? That is, why are questions of justice and love in need of a separate dramatic space? The Republic’s closest encounter with the erotic centers around the definition of marriage, which, in the highest echelon of society, dissolves the family and requires all progenitors to raise all offspring. Family ties, it appears, are a threat to the State. These other dialogues feature glances into togas and pornographic mythology, removing the conventionally asexual term “platonic relationship” from at least this reader’s lexicon.

Plato’s enormous scope of interests isn’t something we can comprehensively consider in one hour on Tuesday. What I’m aiming to do is introduce and discuss Plato on whichever level our discussion tends to go. His writing is a continual source of thoughtfulness and worthwhile reflection for me. If you have never read him but would like to try him out, the place virtually all universities have students begin is with Euthyphro (pronounced: ‘youth-uh-fro’), a 15 page inquiry into the nature of piety. It contains some subtle logical moves, but is couched in dramatic irony about the violent nature of the gods as told by Homer and Hesiod. All else being equal we’ll discuss this dialogue (whether we’ve all read it or not, I recommend the Grube translation), Plato’s method—and how it compares to previous Greek figures like Homer, Thucydides, Socrates, and Sappho—and if we get far enough, consider Nietzsche’s views on Plato as expressed in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.