Symposium

I've been meaning to post about each speaker in Plato's Symposium as I read them, but that plan fell to the wayside.  I'm three speakers in (not counting the framing device) and have yet to post...

I'm going to jump to the middle, because otherwise I'll never catch up.  Pausanias talks about the two types of eros.  There is the heavenly love, associated with love of the mind, and there is earthly love, associated with love of the body.  The former can inspire us to great things, like sacrifice on behalf of the loved one, and, hence, tyrants are afraid of it.  Pausanias also associates heavenly love with homosexuality, and this is why, he claims, cities other than Athens outlaw it.  The other cities are tyrannies, and so they worry that heavenly love will cause citizens to revolt against the government.

I found Pausanias's discussion of the laws of pederasty somewhat confusing, although it's hard to tell if that's because I'm just not in the right frame of reference.  I also find Pausanias unconvincing, but, again, it's hard to tell if that's deliberate.

On the other hand, I found the next speaker, Eryximachus, relatively easy to read.  He agrees that there are two types of love, but expands them into controlling forces for everything, particularly a person's health.  There is a love of good things, which causes health, and a love of bad things, which is not healthy.  On the other hand, Pausanias says that you need a bit of opposites to achieve a greater harmony.  Food tastes better with a bit of bitter, music sounds better with opposing sounds, and so on.  Just so, a doctor's job is to moderate the desire for the bad things, to where it can be healthful.  (I think so, anyway -- my Greek is not yet as good as I'd like...)

I think this is akin to the story about when the rabbis locked up yetzer ha'ra.  They found that without a touch of greed and competition, everybody just ended up doing nothing all day -- a little bit of the evil inclination can be a good thing.