In the first four books of the Republic, Plato uses the word ‘truth’ on its derivatives in fifteen passages. He uses the word ‘lie’ in thirteen passages, most famously when discussing the “noble lie.” Lies are mentioned more frequently in the first half of the Republic than in the second half; truths are mentioned less frequently in the first than in the second half.

 

The Fifteen ‘Truths’
1. (330E). Cephalus is the first man to mention the true. Old age, he says, brings out the fear that myths of punishment of the unjust in Hades might be true. Cephalus is a caricature of the man of the four cardinal Socratic virtues: He treats old age as a substitute for moderation, piety as a substitute for courage, fatherhood as a substitute for wisdom, money as a substitute for justice (if wealthy, one need not cheat or lie, but perhaps one can bribe the gods). Cephalus is a man impossible to respect who must be respected according to his age and position. Self-deceived, ‘living a lie,’ he half-coerces, half-tempts others to lie to and about him. To speak freely, and perhaps truly, the unwealthy Socrates him to go away.

2. (331c-d). Socrates is the next to mention the true. He asks Cephalus if justice is simply truth-telling and giving back what one takes. His answer to this question is no; it is permissible to withhold both truth and property from a madman. Truth-telling is not necessarily just.

3. (335a). Cephalus’ son, Polemarchus, is the third man to mention the true. Polemarchus (his name means ‘war-ruler’) claims that justice means paying one’s debts, helping friends, and harming enemies. He has the impulses of Carl Schmitt with the mentality of the accountant. Socrates compels him to admit that one must distinguish real friends and enemies from seeming-friends and seeming-enemies. The good, therefore, is not necessarily ‘one’s own.’ Is the true?

4. (3357c). Here Socrates speaks with the “wild beast,” Thrasymachus, who decries Socratic indirection and irony. Socrates exhibits that irony by calling Thrasymachus wise. “Shall I say something other than the truth, you surprising man?” Socrates asks, feigning innocence, on his way to trapping the beast into asserting his own definition of justice without extracting one from Socrates. (This he must do, having scorned Socrates’ holding-back.) Justice is the advantage of the stronger, Thrasymachus says. He openly disdains the self-serving pieties and Cephalus and son, as well as Socrates’ polite evasions. He wants to be seen as a realist, a teller of unpleasant truths, a real man who truly speaks of what truly is.

5. (349a). Thrasymachus sarcastically says, “Your distinction is very true” (sarcasm being the irony of the thumotic man) in response to Socrates’ summary of Thrasymachus’ opinion: injustice is the way of the virtuous and wise, a thing “fair and mighty.” Socrates questions whether Thrasymachus really is” speaking the truth in so asserting, or only joking. For it is virtuous and wise to be knowledgeable, not ignorant, and the knowledgeable man will always have a certain advantage over the ignoramus, whether or not the ignoramus is politically stronger. Thrasymachus sweats and blushes. He is less interested in learning than in having a reputation for learning. In injuring Thrasymachus’ reputation, Socrates silences him, inflicts a mortal wound—if only in speech.

6. (365a-b). The next man to mention the true is Glaucon, “always most courageous in everything,” who wants to know if Socrates wants “truly to persuade us” of the superior goodness of justice. Superior goods are those desirable instrumentally and in themselves. Why not merely seem to be just? Is not injustice what is naturally good? If one had the ring of the tyrant Gyges, with its power of making the wearer invisible, why not satisfy all one’s erotic and thumotic longings with no regard to dull inhibition? An entirely ‘invisible man’ would be a god, known only through his voice and works. Why should a god be just? Glaucon radicalizes, gets to the root, of Thrasymachus’ challenge. Glaucon is a potential tyrant and perhaps a potential philosopher. Which way he will go may depend upon Socrates’ ability truly to persuade him. Of course, truly to persuade someone may or may not be to persuade him of the truth.

7. (362a). Further, Glaucon says, let there be two such rings, and two such men—one just, the other unjust. Make the just man be reputed to be unjust, and make the unjust man seem just. Who is happier? Surely the unjust man, who despises decent conventions and gets what he really wants, “pursues a thing dependent on truth and does not live in the light of opinion.” Surely the unjust man finds happiness, while the pilloried man of justice finds only misery. (Or could there be some ring of Gyges that makes the just man invisible to his enemies? Some true lie to tell them, and preserve himself?)

8. (365c). The next man to mention the true is brother Adeimantus, seconding Glaucon’s opinion in his own characteristically more measured way. Isn’t the just life simply too much trouble? Lighten up; take it easy; gimme a break. Seeming is stronger than the truth, according to the respected poet, Simonides; so draw a shadow painting of virtue around your clever, manipulative soul, and lay hold of the main chance. After all, the very gods can be corrupted with a show of humility and a few token offerings. If Glaucon loves victory, Adeimantus loves honor; if Glaucon is a lion, Adeimantus is a fox.

9. (372e). This dual assault on justice causes Socrates to raise the stakes. Let us try to find justice not in the individual soul but in a city to be founded in speech, by us. This proposal (not incidentally appealing both to Glaucon’s libido dominandi and to Adeimantus’ love of honor), takes the dialogue beyond the souls of petty chiselers and even big tyrants, and to the highest (or is it the lowest?) level: the soul of the founder of the city. Is the founder a divine legislator or a supreme tyrant? In so proceeding, Socrates finds Adeimantus easily satisfied with a modest, austere city, a sort of Minnesota-of-the-mind. Glaucon is more ambitious and more erotic. What, no relishes? No “courtesans and cakes”? But “the true city,” Socrates protests, is the healthy, moderate one. He does not protest too much, quickly turning to “the feverish city” of Glaucon’s imagination. Neither tyrant nor philosopher can rest content in the true city, the small town that satisfies the basic animal necessities and nothing more.

10. (376e). More desires, more wealth: The City now needs guardians, warriors, men not of appetitive eros but of spirit, men who will defend the city without sharing its desires, men who love their own and hate outsiders. This (Socrates playfully suggests) is the philosophic way: to be friendly to the known—a lover of wisdom, a philo-sopher—and unfriendly to the unknown. (It is more likely that the philosopher will be unfriendly not to the unknown but to the incorrigibly unwise, but Glaucon, unwise if not incorrigibly so, doesn’t notice that.)

Turning to Adeimantus, the more patient brother, Socrates tells him that the discussion of the education of these potentially dangerous guardians will take a long time. Part of “music” education is education in speech. Speeches “have a double form, the one true, the other false”; saying it doesn’t make it so. This double form of speech recalls the (possibly) “true myths” Cephalus feared. Will the guardians believe that punishment in Hades awaits bad men?

11. (377a). The tales we tell children are double. As a whole they are false, but with “true things in them.” Such tales must precede action, gymnastic, in the smallest children, inasmuch as “the beginning is the most important part of every work,” especially work with the tender and “plastic” young, on whom impressions are easily ‘imprinted.’ The myth-makers or poets must be compelled to tell stories that will incline the young soul to justice. (Suddenly, when speaking of children who are future guardians, Socrates’ skeptical interlocutor is no longer so ignorant of what justice is, or why injustice might be undesirable.)

12. (382a-b). The most shocking truths poets now tell concern the gods. Gods as liars, thieves, adulterers, gods as changelings and deceivers: You can’t trust such gods; they only weaken the guardians’ needed courage. “Don’t you know,” Adeimantus, “that all gods and human beings hate the true lie, if that expression can be used?” The true lie is the lie of the soul, a falsehood about “what is most sovereign” to oneself. The true lie is ignorance. A spoken lie is a sort of artifact or imitation of a falsity in the soul; inasmuch as no one, god or human, wants anything less than what is good for his own innermost being, the true lie is the true enemy of everyone.

13. (382d). As for spoken lies, they may be useful, “so as not to deserve hatred.” Real enemies and false friends deserve no better. As for poetic tales, they are lies when poets know what they often cannot know—”the truth about ancient things,” such as human origins—but they can be useful lies when they imitate the truth insofar as it is known. The gods need no lies, as they fear no human enemies and are not ignorant of an ancient things. Sober, respectable Adeimantus readily agrees that poetic tales should depict sober, respectable, trustworthy gods. At the same time, Socrates wants to appeal to the thumoeidetic Glaucon: the gods Socrates presents to the young, aristocratic brothers are ‘idealized’; that is, they partake of the stability and transparency of the eidos, a word first spoken in the dialogue by Glaucon, whose name means ‘gleaming.’ These gods do not hide behind clouds; bright as the stars, like good children, they are seen, not heard.

14. (389b-c). The guardians’ education for courage eschews poetic tales of Hades, frightening names, divine grief, divine laughter. The guardians’ education for moderation inculcates obedience, requires restraint with respect to diet, sex, and money. Central to this educational list is truth, which “must be taken seriously, too.” Private men must not handle a lie. A lie may be useful to human beings “as a form of remedy”; only “doctors” can be trusted to lie rightly. In politics, the doctors are the rulers; they may lie “for the benefit of the city.” The ruled must not lie about political things to the rulers, any more than a sick man should lie to his doctor about symptoms. Respectable Adeimantus concurs in this unequal distribution of latitude.

Inasmuch as the Platonic dialogues consist in large measure of conversations between a philosopher and a rogues’ gallery of quacks, creeps, and ignoramuses, not all of them private men, it would be silly to suppose that Socrates does not see the danger of his argument. The problem the argument raises is not so much the danger of spoken lies as the danger of ignorance—of not knowing what is beneficial to the city and the soul, of the true nature and therefore the true good of the city and the soul.

15. (413a-b). No one wants to lose the truly best by force or fraud. This goes for opinions as well as for objects and persons. “[T]he departure of the false opinion from the man who learns otherwise is willing, that of every true opinion is unwilling.” The guardians must be tested, to see if they guard, hold fast to, the true opinions with which they have been inculcated. Those who pass this testing shall rule the city.

 

The Noble Lie

An example of a true opinion is the noble lie. It’s a Phoenician thing: Theban, to be specific—the myth of autochthony, which will induce guardians to defend their city as, literally, native ground. To autochthony Socrates adds the myth of the metals, whereby the guardians are reconciled to a tripartite political structure whereby auxiliaries will serve the rulers, with whom they are allied in ruling farmers, artisans, and merchants. Autochthony makes the city seem more natural, more literally ‘grounded,’ than it is; the myth of the metals makes nature seem more politically stratified than it is. In this, Socrates shows how to make thumoeidetic Oedipus of Thebes useful instead of tragic. The noble lie is a lie because it exaggerates, ennobles, the truth. But it is a true lie, so to speak, in that it ensures that he who tends most to ignore the body—the heroic man, lover of victory and honor, the ‘ideologist’ who contradictorily loves and abstracts from his own but does not know himself—will moderate his ambitions without denaturing his spirit or intellect.

Self-knowledge is the theme of Book IV, where the word-cluster centered on truth never appears. This may be because the neat division of the soul into three harmonious parts will prove to be in need of correction and supplementation, in the Republic and elsewhere in the dialogues of Plato.

David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

 

A much-ridiculed Victorian lady hoped that Darwin’s theory of evolution was untrue, or, if true, that would not become generally known. As a matter of principle our contemporaries assume that what is true ought always to be made known, that generally-known truth is an unmitigated good, at least in the long run. this assumption has had many consequences, some trivial (you and I probably know more about the British royal family than is entirely healthy), some good (we also know more about health), some catastrophic. In the last category I count false opinions disseminated as if they were true, Marxist dialectic and Nazi race theory being two conspicuous examples. The Victorian lady had a point. She may not have understood science, but she knew something about civilized society.

In line with the Enlightenment project, we moderns have been taught to dismiss Aristotle’s physics as a teaching one or two steps beyond superstition. Can anyone today imagine that the moon is alive, or that the human species is eternal? Does anyone still suppose that the earth is the center of the universe, or that a moving body is trying to get to its ‘natural place’?

David Bolotin agrees that these Aristotelian teachings are now risible on their face. But he denies that Aristotle believed them any more than we do. To follow Bolotin’s argument is not only to overcome one’s superficial impression of Aristotelian science but to reflect upon the character of science—’ancient’ and ‘modern’—in its uneasy relations with the political orders. If ‘science’ means knowledge, more specifically the knowledge of nature, then science does not easily fit into the City of God or the City of Man. If science doesn’t easily ‘fit in,’ if it is vulnerable to misuse and abuse, it needs a defense, an apologia. The Enlightenment exaltation of science was intended to make science invulnerable to attack by giving it some of the authority of the old religious establishments. In view of the attempts at ‘deconstructing’ science in the academy today, and in view of the dangers of the abuse of science and the popularity of pseudoscience, a more cautious stance might be in order.

The defense science has received in the past three centuries has been in a sense far too effective. The rhetoric of Enlightenment tends toward religious fervor without religious consolation, the churchy sort of atheism on display in such unlovely personalities as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. When the quest for certitude pushes into scientific terrain—as it must, if science bears heavy public responsibility—the explorer takes on a pilgrim’s confidence about the destination. He is therefore quite likely to lose his way in a quest where the perplexities are the markers on the road map. Not only does excessive certitude infect science with unscientific dogmatism, it degrades the social and political forms within which any orderly inquiry must proceed.

Aristotle approaches both nature and political life more cautiously than his critics do. For example, when he addresses the problem of how things come into being, he avoids the extreme of poetic accounts on the one hand and of reductionism on the other. To endorse the poetic account in its extreme form—that beings come out of nothing—would be to call into question the existence of nature itself as an object of sustained inquiry. Why study something that is radically contingent upon the many and conflicting wills of the Hesiodian gods? But to attribute beings to an atomized or otherwise inchoate natural substrate would be no improvement; chaotic matter is no better subject of knowledge than warring gods. Aristotle accordingly teaches that form and substance cohere, generating individual beings. He does not believe he knows how this generation occurs. If modern physics (for example) leads physicists back to a ‘Big Bang.’ they tacitly admit that the earliest act of coming-into-being destroyed the conditions of its own occurrence. The remaining evidence of the character of those conditions may well be compromised, indeterminate to scientists.

In considering Zeno’s paradox—if any distance consists of infinitely divisible parts, how can any object traverse that distance?—Aristotle similarly demarcates a space for natural science between religion and mathematics, those twin spheres of certitude. The certitude of religiosity depends on revelation of divine thoughts and actions, which unassisted human reason cannot fathom; the certitude of mathematics depends on abstraction, which unassisted human reason fathoms readily but which the stuff of nature does not resemble. (Thus statistics, the set of modern mathematical techniques designed to describe empirical reality, is probabilistic not apodictic.) Aristotle insists on the foundation of natural science in the perception of individual beings. Neither the infinity of religion nor the infinities of geometric abstractions can account fully for natural objects ‘on their own terms’—as one natural being, man, looks at another. Zeno’s paradox conflates mathematics and science. So, in its own way, does modern political science, starting with Hobbes. A natural scientist need to live with an ‘infinity’ which is really synonymous with indeterminacy. Political men cannot be so relaxed, and so had better not be, or pretend to be, so scientific.

With acute attention to textual detail—the empeiria of reading—Bolotin shows how Aristotle navigates what might be called a ‘second sailing’ for natural science. Unlike the first sailing, the inquiries of previous natural philosophers, this one can avoid the Scylla of political ire and the Charbydis of apolitical folly. Aristotle himself did not entirely avoid Scylla; he had to leave Athens at the right moment in order to avoid reliving the fate of Socrates. But his writings eventually became eminently respectable, in tandem with the biblical religions as understood by thinkers who knew how to think on two tracks. In Bolotin’s words, Aristotle “regarded the task of natural science to be articulation of the manifest character—understood as the true being—of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover.” Thoughtful religious people and prudent scientists alike should be able to live with that formulation, and for centuries many of them did. The symbiosis of religion and natural science may be fruitful; much that is important in modern science and mathematics has resulted in the study of change, a study that a Bible-centered civilization is more likely to care about than was ancient Greece or Rome. But the synthesis of religion and natural science has issued in impressive displays of evil and folly. Bolotin’s Aristotle help to keep the categories straight.

Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985.

 

In the introduction to his translation of the De Amore, Sears Jayne provides a table relating the speeches Ficino has written for his friends to the speeches Plato wrote for the characters in the Symposium. The second and seventh of Ficino’s speakers do not mention the Symposium, Jayne remarks, “and in only one, the sixth, is there a sentence-by-sentence commentary on any part of Plato’s dialogue.” [1] This might lead the reader to suppose that Ficino neglects the Symposium even as he writes what is called a commentary on it. Such a reader would be mistaken. Each speaker in the De Amore tracks his counterpart in the Symposium, if obliquely. Both the tracking and the obliqueness of the tracking serve the purpose of defending the philosophic life in fifteenth-century Florence. Ficino is indeed “defend[ing] the propriety of personal love by showing that it is merely a natural part of a perfectly respectable cosmic process” (Jayne, 12-13). More pointedly, he is defending the propriety of philosophic love as a defensible part of a respectable Christian city.

Plato’s Symposium presents itself as Appolodorus’ account of Aristodemus’ account of the party celebrating the poet Agathon’s victory with his first tragedy (173a). Ficino’s De Amore recounts a party celebrating the traditional birthday of Plato, the author of an account of the untragic tragedy of the beloved (and hated) Socrates. Ficino writes centuries after the death of Socrates, the protagonist of the dialogue he has translated and now comments on. Unlike Plato’s protagonists, Ficino’s need not decide the question, Wine or Eros? They have already chosen to discourse on love, not to drink the night away. Further, between the untragic tragedy of Socrates and Ficino’s dialogue another—but very different—untragic tragedy has occurred: the death of Jesus of Nazareth. In Catholic Italy, any dialogue on amore must also keep an eye on that other kind of love, caritas. [2] Ficino finds himself in a circumstance differing from that of Socrates or Plato. In Ficino’s Italy both philosophy and Christianity are traditions, part of public opinion, whereas in ancient Athens philosophy was a novelty and Christianity of course was unknown. The De Amore shows how a philosopher can take account of this massive change, adapt to it, continue to philosophize with and against it. Philosophy in the Symposium is, famously, a kind of love; Ficino must write ‘de amore’ against the background of a tradition-ridden philosophy—a philosophy in which love has grown cold—and a religion that can at least be interpreted (by no less a figure than Augustine) as requiring a competing form of love.

Ficino replaces the twice-removed narrative structure of the Symposium with the removal of two—two old men, that is. The Bishop of Fiesola and Ficino’s father leave before the speeches begin, “the one for the care of souls, the other for the care of bodies” (36). The authoritative elders must leave before the middle-aged and young men can open their souls on (and to?) love, even as the pious old Cephalus must leave before his friends (and enemies) can begin a candid discussion of justice in the Republic. The Christian world has two authorities where the ancient world had one: fathers remain, but now there are also Fathers.

I. The Symposium‘s first speaker is Phaedrus, Plato’s rhapsodizing friend, familiar from the dialogue that bears his name. Phaedrus is a student of the sophist Hippias, whose primary teaching, ‘like loves like,’ supports ungenerative eros, e. g., pederasty and incest. Phaedrus is indeed ungenerative, a spouter of verses on love culled from “various authorities” (178b). In terms of the tripartite psychology of the Republic, Phaedrus is a man of logoi, words, but not of logos, reasons. He is a man of thumos—and a rather poor specimen at that, lacking any of the grandeur of Achilles or Odysseus. Phaedrus is passive, a receiver of authoritative teachings, neither hero nor lover.

Giovanni Cavalcanti, De Amore‘s first speaker, also presents Phaedrus as a follower—not of a sophist or a poet, but of Plato (37). To follow a philosopher, instead of philosophizing oneself, is to embrace a philosophic doctrine. Accordingly, Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus outlines a doctrine whereby ‘God’ is identical to ‘the Good.’ God has created three worlds: the Angelic Mind, stocked with the forms or ideas, a mind desirous of God, its creator; the World Soul; and the World Body. The forming of ideas in the Angelic Mind is the perfection of love; it is mind made beautiful. Idea-formation is, so to speak, the metaphysical equivalent of the ugly, old Socrates made young and beautiful. Love brings order out of chaos. Love is therefore old—the oldest and wisest of the gods—and supremely worthy of praise. Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus tactfully synthesizes the Platonic ‘Good’ and the Creator-God of the Bible. Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus, like Plato’s, presents a politically correct image of love, allowing for the radical change of political authority in the intervening centuries, a change mirrored in the shift from fathers to fathers and Fathers. The love of Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus does not threaten the laws of the city but instead harmonizes with them, making them effective (40, and cf. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, v. 13). “Every love is virtuous, and every lover is just” because love partakes of “a certain grace” in “avoiding evil and pursuing good” (40-41). Cavalcanti’s Phaedrus has ‘received’ the Gospel according to a Plato who has read the Gospels and knows the power of the Church.

II. The Symposium‘s second speaker is Pausanias, a student of the sophist Prodicus. Pausanias hopes that his listeners will assume—and perhaps he himself assumes—that if there are two Aphrodites there must be two ‘Loves’ or Cupids. One Cupid is heavenly, the other popular or vulgar. Both are pederasts, but only the first is noble. Pausanias calls for a law to prohibit infidelity among vulgar pederasts. He first claims that the laws of Athenian democracy are better than those of foreign, despotically-ruled cities (182d), but soon admit that “our Athenian law” gives “absolute license to the lover” (185c). Pausanias’ dubious division of love leads to self-contradiction in politics. Sophists generally and Prodicus in particular misunderstand both love and politics, on which they nonetheless profess to teach wisely.

After having spoken of Phaedrus, Giovanni Cavalcanti also speaks of Pausanias. Cavalcanti discusses not dualism but ternarism: God’s creation of all things; his attracting of all things to himself; his perfecting of all things (44). Cavalcanti transforms the Pausanian loves into a love generated by divine beauty for itself (46). The Pausanian contradiction becomes a harmonious circle. This genetic account of love comports with neo-Platonic metaphysics, whereby God rests in the center, surrounding by concentric circles—Mind, Soul, Nature, and Matter—and into which circles God (i.e., the Good) emanates its “rays” of beauty (51). Thus God is motionless insofar as ‘he’ is an indivisible point, while nonetheless being present in all things—some of which do move, thereby subsuming Pausanian dualism and contradiction.

All lovers really seek God, even vulgar lovers. “Some of the stupidest men are rendered more intelligent by loving” (53). The fear of God—the beginning of wisdom according to the Bible—serves as an analogue of the fear and trembling of a lover before the beloved. Cavalcanti thus synthesizes Biblical and Platonic love, putting what Pausanias would call popular or vulgar love on a continuum with heavenly love, and reconciling both with fear of the Lord.

Having said all this, Cavalcanti can then bring in Pausanias’ heavenly and vulgar loves explicitly, identifying the first with Mind and intelligence, the second with procreation. On the basis of his harmonizing metaphysics and harmonizing theology, Cavalcanti can make Pausanias’ two loves twins.

The only real dualism Cavalcanti admits is that of “simple” and “reciprocal” love. Simple love means unreciprocated love. Those who do not love a lover back are murderers; they draw another soul out but do not replace it with their own. They refuse to exchange sols, leaving the lover soulless, dead. Here the ‘homosexual’ theme of ‘like unto like’ recurs, in a form acceptable to Christians; lovers mirrors the souls of one another, the beauties of their souls becoming “virtuous, useful, and pleasant to both” (58).

III. Plato’s third speaker is Eryximachus, the lover of Phaedrus and likewise a student of Hippias. Eryximachus stands in for the hiccoughing Aristophanes—temporarily overcome, perhaps by Pausanian conceits. Eryximachus accepts Pausanias’ definition of love into two. But he regards sexual attraction as only one among many manifestations of love, which he identifies in “the bodies of all animals and all growths upon the earth” (186a). A physician, Eryximachus would make medicine and music the architectonic arts, displacing the products of poetic art that Phaedrus recites and the products of legislative art that Pausanias esteems, or claims to esteem. Eryximachus’ love—conceived as cosmic principle—might be described as a physical version of the Cavalcantian metaphysics introduced in the second speech of De Amore. In an ironic coda, by the end of Eryximachus’ speech Aristophanes’ hiccoughs have stopped, cured not by any of the physician’s recommended remedies but by a sneezing fit. Technique does not cure; nature restores its own balance. The scientific art par excellence does not work as advertised.

Cavalcanti’s account of Eryximachus remains characteristically silent with regard to pederasty. Instead, he emphasizes the generativity of love (64). He points to the comprehensiveness of love according to Eryximachus, “for who… will doubt that the love for all things is innate in all things?” (64) He ignores Eryximachus’ Empedoclean invocation of strife as a cosmic principle: “Fire does not flee water out of hatred of water,” Cavalcanti asserts, “but out of love for itself, lest it be extinguished by the coldness of the water” (68); this ‘like unto like’ account is again the only hint of the homosexual them that forms an important part of each of the Symposium‘s first three speeches.

Even more significantly, Cavalcanti carefully ignores the physical character of love according to Eryximachus, as well as his scientistic account of it. This materialism had certain repercussions for moral life. In Eryximachus’ account, it is far from clear by what principle all-comprehending love distinguishes good from bad, noble from base. His emphasis on art or technique leaves open the question, ‘To what end?’ By contrast, Cavalcanti regards love as the ruler of the arts. As seen in his previous speech, love is a ruler that imposes a distinct hierarchy of desires leading up and back to the Good, the origin and end of all.

In sum, the first three speeches of the Symposium feature students of sophists who are also pederasts. Plato more than hints that sophistry and pederasty are alike in their lack of generativity, the result of art or technique divorced from nature. In the first three speeches of De Amore, in contrast, ‘homoeroticism’ exists only in the metaphysical principle of love conceived as ‘like unto like.’ [3] Cavalcanti makes the first three speeches of the Symposium more edifying than they are, and more coherent—individually and collectively. There is no conflict, no tension, no hiccoughing and sneezing here. Structurally, Ficino has emphasized this harmony by giving his three speeches of the De Amore to one man instead of three different men, each trying to outdo the other in love-worthiness. The Platonic agon has been replaced by a Platonic or neo-Platonic doctrine. Plato’s interlocutors’ passivity forces them to preen themselves, present themselves as beauty queens. Ficino sees that ugly old Socrates, who never stoops to conquer, finally attracts more and better souls without primping but by interrogating, challenging, making himself unpopular with many while winning the few to his ‘regime,’ his way of life.

IV. Aristophanes explicitly announces a departure from the themes of the previous speakers (189d). (Indeed, the dialogue thus far might as well be a re-write of the Protagoras.) Love, he contends, is the misunderstood and unappreciated benefactor of the human race; it is not understood (he implies) by sophistic ‘science.’ This firm advocate of traditional religion nonetheless invents his own mythos about the origin of sexual love; under the pressure of the sophists’ scientific-technicist physicalism, Aristophanes formulates a poetic-technicist physicalism.

Science and poetry differ with respect to the gods. The sophists conspicuously slight the gods; the poets conspicuously admire the gods, teaching that men need gods to beat down human hybris, whereas gods need men to honor the gods. Reason—scientific or other—cannot govern hybristic humans, who will accept no restraints but those imposed ‘from above.’ Without such restraints, humanity will destroy itself.

In this central section of his dialogue, Ficino marks the transition from sophists to poets by introducing a new speaker: Ficino’s teacher, Cristoforo Landino. Landino is a poet and scholar devoted to Italy’s architectonic poet, Dante. Consistent with Aristophanes’ project, Landino speaks more piously than the others, emphasizing the pridefulness of Aristophanes’ circle-humans and the justice of their punishment by “God,” who replaces Zeus in the Landinian retelling. Crucially, Landino’s circle-humans are guilty of “turning to the inner light alone,” away from the divine light; “they fell immediately into bodies” (72). Landino suppresses Aristophanes’ anti-hybristic physicalism in favor of an anti-hybristic Neo-Platonism. We are no longer humbled by the claim to be no better than the rest of material nature, but by the claim that nature encompasses higher things than ourselves. The love experienced by the God-divided humans reminds them of their radical dependence upon God and upon one another, impelling them to seek wholeness. Landino relates this division to the Biblical account of the Fall (72). He ‘platonizes’ Aristophanes’ mythos by associating the three original sexes not with sexual practices—male and female homosexuality, heterosexuality—but with three of the four Platonic virtues: courage, temperance, justice. He omits wisdom; wisdom is less intimately connected to bodily concerns than the other three virtues.

In the Symposium, Aristophanes is Socrates’ opponent. In the De Amore they do not seem to contend, as Aristophanes has been ‘platonized,’ de-physicalized. The soul rules the body; the soul is truly man: “All the things that Man is said to do the soul itself does; the body merely suffers them” (75). Soul rules by perceiving both natural and divine light; the natural light alone would confine soul to the task of ministering to the body. This imagery doesn’t comport very well with the Aristophanean mythos, wherein physical, sexual longing for the ‘other half’ comes only after the division of the circle-humans, but that is the price the later, platonizing poet must pay in order to make poetry support the four Platonic virtues—all expressive of masculine and feminine traits in combination (77). Landino thus makes the recovery of androgyny respectable in a Christian-Platonic setting.

After presenting a religious version of the duty of reciprocity in love that Cavalcanti had set down with respect to human love (79), Landino concludes by listing the three benefits of love. Love restores us to the comprehensive whole, that of Heaven; love assigns us our just place within that whole and causes us just satisfaction in our place; love constantly renews the soul’s pleasure, so that the whole and our place within it never tire us (80). Landino’s ‘platonization’ of Aristophanes combines politics with pleasure in an origin myth—the Aristophanean enterprise, disembodied. In both myths, love closes a circle that had been sundered. But Landino makes the Aristophanean human comedy a Dantean divine comedy.

V. From the comic poet, Aristophanes, the Symposium moves to the tragic poet, Agathon. Agathon speaks not of the effects of Love on humans but (more ambitiously) of the god himself. Agathon does so in in order to use poetry to vindicate the old, the traditional, but to ‘make it new,’ to celebrate Love as youth. In this he is a more openly poetic technicist than Aristophanes, whose innovations are intended to defend ancient beliefs of Athenian countrymen against such urban novelties as sophistry and philosophy. Agathon is another student of a sophist: Gorgias. But he displays none of the cynicism of the other students of sophists. That is to say, he is a superior practitioner of their art.

Agathonian Love is soft, delicate, beautiful, peaceful, and young—a flower child. This god is endlessly self-delighted, entirely untragic. He defends himself only be being too comely to kill. Whereas Gorgias taught that might makes right, Agathonian Love mounts nothing more worrisome than a charm offensive. He is Freedom forever eluding grim Necessity. Agathon is a tragedian who doesn’t really believe in tragedy. Transported to the late nineteenth century, he would write not the Birth but the Death of Tragedy. He undermines his own artistic genre. To show how far superior he is to the others, to show how much better he has mastered their art, he undertakes to show himself far superior to his own art, the art for which he has just received high honor from the citizens of Athens.

Carlo Marsuppini, a student of Ficino’s, speaks of Agathon. Carlo preserves, even intensifies, the delicacy of Agathonian Love by emphasizing Love’s incorporeality.  Love is not merely untragic or ‘light’ in the adjectival sense. Love is light—the noun—”pentrat[ing] the body of air and water everywhere without obstruction… nowhere soiled when it is mixed with these filthy things” (91). Thus “all this beauty of the World, which is the third face of God, presents itself as incorporeal to the eyes through the incorporeal light of the sun” (91). We see beautiful things, but only as beautiful images, in our ‘mind’s eye.’ Physical, sexual penetration is trivial compared to the all-pervasive incorporeal power of true love.

Carlo accordingly replaces Landinian prudence or practical wisdom with wisdom tout court. In the higher realm that his mind inhabits there is no need for prudence. [4]  As with Agathon, Carlo’s love is a peacemaker, “sooth[ing] the minds of gods and men” (98). Carlo ascends quickly from the earth to the Angelic Mind, turning lovingly to the face of God (99). His Love is not only the youngest but also the oldest of the gods. God, through the Angelic Mind, lovingly created the Ideas (and so Love is older than they). But Love also animates the Ideas, renewing them eternally by keeping them oriented toward their Creator. Untragically, again agreeing with Agathon, Carlo ranks Love above Necessity. Love begins in God and is eternally free; Necessity begins in created things, degenerating with them. Carlo brings Platonic love as close as it can get to caritas.

VI. Socrates follows the charming Agathon by charmlessly calling all the previous speakers liars (“I was such a silly wretch as to think that one ought in each case to speak the truth about the person eulogized” [198d]). Aristophanes had distinguished poetry from sophistry; Socrates lumps them together as techniques for producing falsehoods. If true love is love of truth, Socrates must unseductively reject the pretty lies of sophists and poets. Poets and sophists cajole, flatter; they make Love a beautiful god. But love or desire implies want; if love desires beauty, it cannot itself be beautiful.

This does not mean that love is ugly. Love is non-beautiful, between beauty and ugliness. (Socrates ignores another possibility, that Love is beautiful but desires still more beauty; this would confirm the ‘like unto like’ claim of Cavalcanti’s Eryximachus. Socrates associates godliness with autarchia or self-sufficiency, and it is on this basis that he denies the divinity of Love.)  The gods are good and beautiful; love is not beautiful but desirous of beauty; ergo, Love is not a god. Love is a daimon, a being between men and gods; Love is the offspring of Poverty and Resource, i.e., of the desire for and the capacity to approach wisdom (203d). Love is the human soul’s daimonism; the human soul is not immortal, but wants immortality. “Love loves the good to be one’s own forever,” Diotima said to Socrates (206a).

Love’s resourcefulness woos the beautiful in order to beget upon it. More precisely, erotic souls are begotten upon by the beautiful. Moral beings can only become immortal by replacing themselves. Impregnated by a (necessarily brief) encounter with the beautiful, erotic souls generate poems, laws, and, best of all, “a plenteous crop of philosophy” (210d). The paradox—the reason for all the gender-bending in the Symposium, is that the aggressive, ‘male’ erotic soul is the one impregnated by the lady-in-waiting, the Beautiful. Like Romeo, the erotic soul climbs the ladder of love to the beautiful, but in Socrates’ account it isn’t Juliet who might give birth.

The soul, being mortal, must finally descend the ladder or (to recall another dialogue) reluctantly return to the cave that is the city. There political philosophy begins, but Diotima only mentions politics in passing. Socrates speaks of Diotima and beauty to these men, men who have shown more interest in beauty than in justice.

Tommaso Benci, Ficino’s contemporary and friend, speaks on Socrates’ speech. As Jayne notices, this longest speech of De Amore is also the one that most closely tracks its counterpart in the Symposium. Benci sees that Socratic love is not a god but an “emotion… halfway between the beautiful and the not beautiful,” an emotion Diotima calls a daimon (109). This ‘naturalizing’ of the ‘demonic’ or erotic comports with Ficino’s conversion of Thomas Aquinas’s seven gifts of the Holy Spirit into gifts of the seven planets (146 n. 22). Benci is markedly less poetic and pious than the Dantist Landino. Even the religious life, Benci notes, results from natural love (128). Platonism is an incorporeal naturalism, distinct from the corporeal naturalism of the sophists and the incorporeal supernaturalism of the Christians.

Accordingly, Benci emphasizes the illusionary character of love, how a lover imagines that the beloved is more beautiful than he really is, unwittingly transforming the image of the beloved’s mind into a copy of the lover’s beautiful soul (114). Benci thus echoes Socrates’ rude demand for truth-telling. Perhaps as a nod to pious sensibilities, Benci calls love neither mortal nor immortal, in contrast to Socrates, who firmly calls it mortal. But Benci soon notes that such ‘immortality’ as love may be said to have refers to the persistence of love during a human life (128). The ‘eternal’ life described by Benci is, as for Socrates, a matter of philosophic propagation (131). Philosophic propagation is the one way to make erotic activity among males generative (135).

In considering Diotima’s ladder, Benci explicitly identifies beauty with the light of the Sun (God, the Good), a move Diotima leaves implicit. Benci shares the Socratic insistence that the sophistic and poetic esteem for the body is narcissistic, a serious error many souls make. Unlike Socrates, however, Benci apparently does not see that the soul must come down the ladder, live in the world of politics, care for the body it inhabits. Benci does not full appreciate the implications of his own argument that the soul is not really immortal. [5] He follows Socrates in ranking intellectual virtues higher than moral virtues (although this terminology is Aristotelian, not Socratic) (143). But he classifies prudence as an intellectual virtue, simply, missing the link prudence supplies in Platonic (and Aristotelian) thought between the philosopher and the city.

In the nineteenth and final section of his speech, Benci speaks quite piously. Socrates of course under far less compulsion to do so, given his audience in the Symposium. On the other hand, Socrates was eventually required to drink hemlock, and neither Benci nor Ficino was. Perhaps they practiced more prudence, even if they talked about it less. Or perhaps they exercised prudence by talking about it less.

VII. Plato’s interlocutors descend from the ladder with a jolt when the drunken Alcibiades bursts in. Compelled to tell the truth about Socrates (in vino veritas?), Alcibiades calls him a satyr whose pipes are his lips, entrancing mankind wit logos. Socrates alone makes Alcibiades feel shame, for he compels Alcibiades to admit that “I neglect myself while I attend to the affairs of Athens” (216a). The theme of shame had first been broached by Phaedrus in the dialogue’s opening speech. Alcibiades is also a thumotic man, but his is an active, dominating soul, not a passive, Phaedrian one. The problem of Alcibiadian or aggressive thumos will lead Ficino’s commentator not to a discussion of Phaedrus but to a discussion of Socrates’ description of the soul in the Phaedrus.

In person and in speech, Alcibiades says, Socrates is ugly on the outside, beautiful within. [6]. The inner Socrates is a being of courage, moderation, and wisdom; Alcibiades cannot quite bring himself to say that the inner Socrates is also just. Poor, unshod, externally ugly Socrates looks like Love. But with respect to humans he is the unloving beloved. Rich, externally beautiful Alcibiades looks like the Good, but his soul is a veritable democracy of disorder. Like Athens itself, he dreams futilely of conquering Socrates, who will never love him because Alcibiades is not good enough.

Cristoforo Marsuppini, the younger brother of Carlo but singled out as “very thoughtful” (153), gives the speech on Alcibiades. He begins with a harmonizing summary of the Platonic interlocutors, presenting them as if their speeches had been complementary. In a world of religious and philosophic tradition, syncretism replaces dialectic—on the surface. The philosophic aim in this circumstance is to eroticize syncretism, which seems to have achieved a blissful unity of one and all, in order to keep philosophic eros, thus philosophy itself, alive.

Apparent harmoniousness notwithstanding, Cristoforo does address one aspect of Alcibiades’ disruption: the nature of “vulgar love,” that “perturbation of the blood” (164). Vulgar love is a disease. Cristoforo discusses the four humours and the effect vulgar love has on each; in a discourse anticipatory of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, he recommends a regimen of love cures. Here Cristoforo speaks like a Renaissance Eryximachus. Eryximachean medicine has been put in its place; it cures the disease of vulgar or bodily love in order to clear the soul’s way for better things. [7]

Whereas the Symposium“s final section presents a descent from the heights, Cristoforo describes an ascent of the ladder. After vulgar love has been purged, the beast tamed, the soul can turn to divine love. The ascending steps of divine love—that is, love-mania—are the poetic, the “mysterial,” the prophetic, and the amatory (170). Poetry’s music harmonizes the soul, calming corporeal lusts, awakening the soul’s “higher parts”; the Dionysian mystery (in this decidedly ‘Apollonian’ formulation) concentrates the soul’s attention on the intellect, “by which God is worshipped”; the prophetic/Apollonian mania takes the intellect, now fully supported by the other soul elements, to its own proper unity; finally, the “celestial Venus” directs the unified intellect to its telos, “the divine beauty and thirst for the Good” (170). Cristoforo illustrates this with the image of the soul as charioteer, chariot, and two horses, the famous Socratic image in the Phaedrus (171).

Cristoforo’s account of Socratic love leads not to the Symposium but to an apologia of Socrates. Socrates’ companionship, philosophic companionship, is the “single way of safety for the young” (173). Socrates is the true lover, the good shepherd who protects his flock from wolfish false lovers. Cristoforo’s Socrates does nothing but improve his young interlocutors, from Plato to Xenophon to Alcibiades. Socratic love leads the young to divine love. Socratic love here is love for persons, not only for the Good. Socratic love here is caregiving love, not unlike the love of Jesus for those He redeems. On this pious, harmonizing note the seventh speech and the dialogue itself ends, seven being the number of completion.

Conclusion

Despite its syncretist surface, the De Amore features the same tension between poetry and philosophy that may be seen in the Symposium. Ficino replaces the rivalry of Aristophanes and Socrates with that of Landino and Benci. But the tension is far less apparent in De Amore, for two reasons. First, Ficino is more discreet than Plato, because he needs to be; the Renaissance philosopher must deal not with a fickle but usually tolerant populace but with an ever-vigilant religious elite. Second, Ficinian love ‘works both ways.’ The philosopher loves the Good, but the Good also is presented as ‘loving’ the philosopher back. Love is a metaphysical force, circulating through creation, returning to its origin, the Good. This may be Ficino’s prudent rhetorical compromise with Christianity. It may also be his appropriation, with gratitude, from Christianity.

In De Amore, Ficino has written another chapter in the long, complex story of the relations between religion and philosophy—more specifically, of the relations between Christianity and Platonism. (The city comes in along with religion, because even the duality of Church and State is no sharp separation in Catholic Italy; the relations between religion and philosophy are also relations between the city and philosophy.) Augustine gives one, firmly Christian, account of this relationship. Origen gives a very different and (as I think) Platonic account. Ficino in my view belongs on the Platonic-philosophic side of the ledger, replacing Jesus of Nazareth with Socrates as “good shepherd.” But, unlike Bruno (and unlike Socrates?), Ficino was much too prudent to get himself killed by his city. His way of saying “God” when meaning “the Good” exemplifies this approach. (Philosophers as much as political and religious men need to master the art of rhetoric.) His departures from the text of the Symposium are designed to bring the thoughtful reader of his time and place, of the sovereign city of Florence and its regime, back to the Symposium, but safely. The beautiful harmony of the De Amore is the bait for philosophy’s salutary if sometimes painful hook. The philosophy of De Amore has nothing to do with ‘modernity’ (if understood as Machiavellianism), but is rather an instance of several Renaissance thinkers’ attempt to recover the philosophy of antiquity. Whether this recovery then paved the way for philosophic modernizers (Machiavelli of course uses examples from Rome, along with some from the Bible), is another question. The modernizers needed an atmosphere friendly to investigations relying upon the unassisted powers of the human mind. The recovery of ancient philosophy adds to such an ethos, but does not itself directly cause ‘modernizing.’

 

Notes

1. Sears Jayne: Introduction, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985, 9-10.
2. On the distinction between these two kinds of love, see Denis de Rougemont: Love in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Anders Nygren: Eros and Agape: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1941).
3. Conversely, see Ficino’s letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti: “Opposites are not loved by opposites,” in Marsilio Ficino: The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1988), 29. Hereinafter cited as Letters. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller: The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964), 110-115. Hereinafter cited as Kristeller 1964.
4. See Ficino, Letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, Letters, op. cit., 30-32.
5. See again Ficino’s letter to Cavalcanti, ibid. Is Ficino himself as ‘idealistic’ or naïve as Benci? Not necessarily. the final paragraph of the letter contains an ironic twist. After adjuring his young friend to stay away from politics because “truth does not dwell in the company of princes” (30), after piling example upon example of princely injuries to innocent philosophers, Ficino straight-facedly writes: “However, if anyone, ignorant of our affairs, raises our long-standing friendship with the Medici, I shall reply that they should not properly be called princes, but something greater and more sacred,” namely, “fathers of their country in a free state” (32). Ficino is a philosopher who can deal with princes, evidently so long as they are sufficiently distinguished. He may not think his young friend is yet up to that task.
6. See Ficino, Letter to Giovanni Niccolino: “We should not read the works of philosophers and theologians with the same eye as we read those of poets and orators. In other writings, even though much may please us superficially, hardly anything is found to give nourishment. But in these it is not the outer covering which nourishes anyone but what lies within…. That is why the fruits of wisdom should be carefully removed from their skins so that they may bring nourishment.” (Letters 60)
7. See also Letter to Philosophers and Teachers of Sophistry (Letters 11-12).
8. In this I diverge from Kristeller, who writes, “Augustine is Ficino’s guide and model in his attempt to reconcile Platonism with Christianity” (Kristeller 15). The strong sense of the personhood of God, the stubbornness of sin, and the inadequacy of philosophy—all so vividly present in Augustine, and in Paul the Apostle before him—are missing in Ficino. Kristeller admits this with respect to sin; see Kristeller 211). I can only add that if one admits the point about sin, one must admit all the rest.