Mihaela Ursa

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

mihaela_ursa@yahoo.com

 

 

When Plato Laughs

 

 

Abstract: The present paper re-investigates one of the most important Platonic dialogues in the light of the mythos-logos dialectic, as defined by J.J. Wunenburger. The myth of the androgynous, in Symposium, is reconsidered in the light of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “seriocomic” or “the culture of folk laughter”, as an anthropogenetic parody of a mythocractic discourse on genesis. The reevaluation of Plato reception meets narratologic reading to prove that Aristophanes retelling of the myth must be read inside the context of Platonic discourse and not independently.

Keywords: Plato; Socrates; the Symposium; Aristophanes; Eros; Androgynous; Mikhail Bakhtin; „the culture of folk laughter”; Marsilio Ficino.

 

 

Almost exclusively, interpretations of the androgynous’ myth begin with Plato[1]. Two of the most famous – and most resistant – projections of the meaning and nature of love originate in the same text, respectively Plato’s Symposium. Of Plato’s dialogues, this one is frequently ignored by philosophers (s. Szleźak’s reproach to Hegel[2]) or only taken into account for Socrates’ intervention. On the other hand, to the non-philosophers (that is, philologists or less specialized public), the same dialogue is worth reading mainly for Aristophanes’ intervention. Whichever the case, Symposium gives two very different descriptions when it comes to defining love in relationship to the Absolute. These are androgynous love and, respectively, Platonic love. Of the two, androgynous love seems to be the more widely known, concentrating readers’ attention with magnetic force[3], while the determinant details of the ascensional, Platonic love – the one model meant to center the dialogue – are remembered with less precision and more difficulties. The way the posterity read The Symposium – throughout its long cultural history – was decisively influenced by its most important metatext that is Marsilio Ficino’s comment, entitled “On Love or Plato’s Symposium”. The translation he gives to the dialogue, „to the recognition of those of Latin tongue”[4], in the epoch of Lorenzo the Magnificent is accompanied by his canonical comment, where Ficino promises to explain „the mysteries that were harder to decipher in that book”[5] and where he lays his interpretation under the sign of Love. The great authority of Ficino and his Platonist reading is partly responsible for the interpretation of Aristophanes’ discourse as a logos on love, that is a truth-discourse, meant to explain the fascination of both human sexuality and the inter-gender attraction. In fact, Plato’s representation of the myth is far from serious and exposes the very mythicization of the androgynous’ legend in contrast to the actual truth-discourse on love, that belongs to Socrates[6] quoting Diotima.

 

Telling and retelling a myth

 

It is my contention that this particular Platonic dialogue opposes two different valuations of Love: the mythic one (parodied and even ridiculed, undermining the metaphysical reading of the Androgynous myth as some sort of logos spermatikos, that is a seminal inner reason or explanation) and the logocentric[7] one (where Love leads up the ladder of absolute Good, Truth and Beauty). Also, the dialogue presents one of the clearest cases of receptive alteration, partly due to its most important (and canonical) reading. This alteration shifted the emphasis of content reception from Platonic love (which is supposed to structure the Socratic speech, but which also has a more difficult “fable”) to androgynous love (a much simpler story with the same – in Ficinian (mis)reception – absolute symbolic meaning). Also, one should take into consideration the fact that all Platonic dialogues represent novel kernels, as some theorists of literature have pointed out over the years. The idea that Plato had no literary intent or no narrative skills is entirely mistaken and that makes all the difference as far as the treatment of the androgynous’ myth is concerned.

Aristophanes’ discourse explains, in The Symposium, the myth of the androgynous. Ficino dedicates the fourth part of his comment to this ”dark complex doctrine, /…/ woven in very obscure words.”[8]. His text operates with two conceptual screens: the former one is that of critical analysis, even if all it does is separate the mythical “meaningless” representations (that only have for Ficino a conjunctive role: „to connect between them and tie those things together”) from the mythical representations that “really have meaning”. Using the critic selector, Ficino not only disregards literal interpretation, but he also warns the reader against the risk of “believing” „everything that appears in myths”. His second screen is a Christian one, and the commentator uses it to translate, engaging the common code of Love as absolute term, the Platonic fable into a testimonial lesson[9]. The story of the androgynous creature tells Ficino that “if we honour God as we should, He shall then bring us back to our primordial looks and He shall heal us and make us happy”[10]. Even if later interpreters lose the Christian screen, they still mantain the mythic one, commenting on the tragedy of human inherent separation rather than of Platonic irony.

Here starts the almost uninterrupted tradition of reading the androgynous myth in the Symposium on the major note of the doctrine of Ideas, as an anticipation of Diotima’s speech (for Jean Libis), as a supplementary configuration of the connection Loves entertains with the Absolute, that is as a metaphysical fable[11]. Still, nothing is further from the truth. The Platonic translation of the androgynous myth is rather parodic and comic, and not necessarily meant as a “truth discourse” (not even at a symbolical level). Plato’s writing itself is given mythological or even religious value by those readers who see in his Androgynous the Androgynous of the myth proper. In a most famous study on the subject, Jean Libis wrongly equates Plato’s text with Aristophanes’ text, that is the text of the author and the text of one of his characters[12]. In doing that, readers lose the complete picture of the dialogue, which is a coherent narrative unit. They completely block out the narrative motivations of Plato’s writing regarding form and expression (other that content) or even his intention of presenting the ascensional Platonic love as his own proposition of absolute erotics. Of crucial importance in the economy of the dialogue, Aristophanes’ speech counterpoints Socrates’, illuminating the Platonic doctrine of absolute love, but without constituting in itself a metaphysical lesson on love. One should not mistake the Platonic retelling of the oriental myth with “the androgynous’ myth”, since one should take into account the fact that “telling a mythical story does not mean transporting a fact or an idea to an imaginary discourse, but /…/ manifesting some intelligibility, expressing some meaning through a narrative voice. The myth appears then as a linguistic and symbolic structure through which an intellectual content enters our comprehension universe.”[13]. I give further extension here to Wunenburger’s definition, for it is not only true for the constitution of the mythic narrative, but also for the literary borrowings of it, as it is Plato’s in the Symposium. In the philosopher’s “comprehension universe”, the retelling of the androgynous’ myth serves the purpose of better illuminating what Socrates later has to say. Furthermore, let’s keep in mind the relationship between real Socrates and real Aristophanes and give some credit to the idea that Plato could have played his own revenge in the Symposium. If so, Plato’s Aristophanes believes that real knowledge on human condition is coded in myth (even if he jests about it), much as real Aristophanes believed that real knowledge is coded in poetry, independently from reason or philosophy. As a character, the comediographer is described by Socrates himself in the dialogue on love as completely enslaved to Aphrodite and Eros, that is to sexual incentives: “Aristophanes, whose whole concern is with Dionysus and Aphrodite” (177e).

The hypothesis that Aristophanes’ intervention must be read as a Platonic irony or even a Platonic laughter both at Aristophanes’ expense and at the religious reading of myths, instead of a plain retelling of the myth on human attraction and finitude, has at least two supporting proofs. The former is connected to the poetics of the text: this is an epic dialogue, raising different narrative questions from a played-out dialogue, where Socrates and his companions appear directly. The second one is given by the main stake of the dialogue, that is by the explanation on the nature of Eros, offered by Socrates himself (through Diotima).

 

Seeing with your own eyes

 

Let us examine them one by one. As far as the poetic argument is concerned, I firstly take into account the proto-novelistic character of the dialogue, noted by Schlegel and reconsidered by Bakhtin[14], that is characteristic of most Platonic dialogues. It is given by the particular manner in which the author uses the story tenses as well as by the use of the dialogal mask of the wise-fool, or the learned simpleton (the foundation of the narrative representation of the Socratic method). Also, Xenofon can be invoked, as he describes, in his Memorabilia, Socrates’ speech as “half joking (paiźon) and half in earnest (spoudaźon)”[15].

Here is a possible systematisation of the temporal levels of the Platonic introduction:

T1 – the immediate present; Apollodor answers an undisclosed interlocutor and some undisclosed questions

T2 – recent past; „the day before yesterday”, Apollodor is intercepted by Glaucon on his way from Phalerum to the city

T3 – uncertified past; unstable and ephemeral; Glaucon misplaces in this hypothetical time Agathon’s feast; „were you present at this meeting?”

T4 – supplementary past, a secondary elaboration of T3; an unreliable narrator delivers Glaucon a fake story of the symposium: „his narrative was very indistinct”

T5 – perspectival past, of Agathon the tragographer, „for many years”

T6 – a well established past, fixed by Apollodor in relation to Socrates, „not three years have elapsed since I became acquainted with Socrates, and have made it my daily business to know all that he says and does”

T7 – a referential supplementary past, that Apollodor qualitatively opposes to T6 in a comment on the happiness that knowing Socrates has brought into his life: ”a time when I was running about the world”

T8 – the past of the actual feast: „In our boyhood, /…/, when Agathon won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory.”

T9 – the past of Aristodemus the Cydathenian telling about the feast, since „he had been at Agathon’s feast”; the authentication proof: „I have asked Socrates about the truth of some parts of his narrative, and he confirmed them.”

T10 – going back to T1, Apollodor starts telling the story on their way to Athens

The Introduction is initiated and ended by the same actor, that is Apollodor of Phalerum, a close friend of Socrates. He is trusted by Glaucon to have “the true story” of the symposium in Agathon’s honour. In reality, he only relies on the memory of the story told by the only one who could withstand the truth challenge, that is Aristodemus the Cydathenian. Remarkably enough, in spite of the temporal pluri-perspective and the mnemotic restoration of a “time of truth”, Apollodor acts as a revealing by-pass. The long temporal distance of tense T8 is denied by the corrective intervention of T8 on tenses T3-T7, which are brought closer to contemporaneity by Socrates’ confirmation functioning as authenticating proof. Another way of temporal short-circuiting is Apollodor’s presence itself in tense T8 (“in our boyhood”), as a proximate to the single reliable witness.

What could have initially been a mytho-heroic tense (T3, T5 or even T8), marked by the ambiguity and the obscurity necessary for one such configuration, becomes, with Apollodor’s help, an ephemeral tense, unstable and easily disrupted, a tense that is taken to contemporary order by means of correction or of ironic interruption. Apollodor’s authorial discourse – a generator, narratologically speaking, of the entire Symposium – looks to establish a contemporary intimacy with the discourse of the wise-men invited to Agathon’s party. With this new illusion of temporal simultaneity, Apollodor vouches for himself as a veridical narrator and, besides, marks his entire story with the sign of the “seriocomic”[16].

I do not intend here to investigate the entire dialogue on this level. Still, it is my contention that in the short introduction to the Symposium lie the first textual clues as to an authorial pre-orientation of the reading of the “Love dialogue” in the direction of the culture of laughter. Also, this usage of distance, time and narration “has to do with the scandalous or dangerous implications of this meeting[17]”. If continued, this demonstration should take into account the paradigmatic enterprise of Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Literature and Aesthetics, where the genre of Socratic dialogues finds its place along “mimics on simple subjects of Sofronis, the entire bucolic poetry, fable, early literature of memoirs,/…/ pamphlets, /…/, Roman satyre, the vast literature of ’symposia‘,/…/ the Menippean satyre and the dialogues in the manner of Lucianus”, in the „domain of the seriocomic”, an elaboration of the “folk culture of laughter”[18]. To these adds the parodical figure of Aristophanes, who is later referred to as a mistaken speaker by Diotima in 205e and also never given back the floor in the end, when he wants to say something but never gets to do it anymore, not to mention his own recognition of the fact that he is the victim of a major hangover from the previous night of drinking: “I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.” (176b). “The demon of folk laughter” does not really haunt Agathon’s party until the speech that introduces the androgynous’ myth, a myth one usually reads with great seriousness, as a mythocratic exhibition of an imaginary explanation on the origin of mankind.

 

The androgynous – a discoursive hiccup?

 

Aristophanes’ speech “starts” twice in the dialogue: in the first instance, it is related to a paratextual word-game, after Pausanias’ speech[19]. This is the mis-begining of his discourse, since Aristophanes starts hiccupping, („he had either eaten too much, or from some other cause he had the hiccough”), and so he asks doctor Eryximachus to speak first, but not before healing him from his most unfortunate hiccup. The real start is enveloped in a net of textual ironic-comic artifices: instead of hiccuping, Aristophanes[20] starts sneezing and after that he hiccups again. This accumulation of physiological noises makes the comediographer meditate upon “whether the harmony of the body has a love of such noises and ticklings” (189a). Eryximachus reads his interlocutor’s meditation as a form of mockery and, consequently, threatens to do everything in his power to „have a laugh” at his expense[21]. This is the reason why, after completing his speech on the same note, the comediographer imitates the doctor’s predictable response: „I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun” (193b)

The exposition of the androgynous’ myth, of our great myth of absolute, immortal love starts with a lusty, suffering from a hangover comediographer (who, on top of it all, mocked Socrates in a manner that will add to his deadly accusation) warning us of “comic things” being spoken[22], since such a thing is „which is to the manner born of our muse and would be all the better”, his only concern being the warding off of the ridicule. His speech is – naturally as it may be – a “hiccup” or a “sneeze” of this symposium, and it has an obvious counterpointing character (the proof lies both in the particular organizing of its content and in the introductory strategies). In order for Agathon’s party to become the Symposium, it is necessary for Aristophanes to hiccup along with his speech – the self same that deals with androgynous, “perfect” love. The tragic story of people knowing love because they have been in perpetual search of each other, since their separation from an original unit is, for Aristophanes, the Platonic narrator, the history of a hilarious-grotesque anthropogenesis. The androgynous deity presented by Plato is one of the anthropogenetic monsters, but it also bears the undeniable mark of comic: „He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.”(190a).

Besides referring to tumblers rolling over, the text resorts to a series of significant similes, in order to particularize both the image and “the lesson of humility”. Zeus cuts humans in two “like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling”, „as you might divide an egg with a hair” or „as you might cut a flat fish”, Apollo pulls all the skin together „like the purses which draw in” and straightens any wrinkles „much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last” (190d-e), and the unhappiness of the torn apart beings translates into terms of utilitarian-physiological malfunction: „each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart” (191a-b) The role of these comparisons with clear referents in immediate, familiar realities is the deletion of any epic distance able to support the mythic-religious character of the story. By means of these comparisons, any form of respectful assimilation or even anguished reception – necessary to the mythical story – is replaced by irreverence, as it happens in the key-moment when Aristophanes overinterprets the unhappy ending of broken humanity. On one hand, the moment entirely observes the pattern of the mythical story, by insisting on “the lesson” of praising gods, but on the other hand it represents the last comic figure of this particular speech. The narrator warns against further pride: humans will then be cut in four, „like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies”. (193a)

 

The Platonic Androgynous – Father of Adulterers of the World

 

There is a point of intrinsic logic that I need to make here: the androgynous myth in its Platonic version needs to be reconsidered from the perspective of the culture of laughter and as such two things need to be taken into account. Firstly, from the three original races of people, the androgynous is not the highest one of the hierarchy and secondly, the stake of the entire Platonic dialogue is somewhere else, respectively, according to the unwritten rule of most Platonic dialogues[23], in the Socratic intervention, where the real explanation on the nature of Eros is exposed (i.e. the concept of Platonic love).

Usually, in literary and analytic references to the androgynous’ myth represented by Plato, the attention is mainly focused on the text we have examined so far, while in philosophical one this part is obnubilated by the analysis of Socrates’ discourse. Actually, until this point, Aristophanes has but told the legend, without the significance that is paradigmatically associated to it. Axiomatic hierarchy, value assignation are yet to follow, more precisely from the moment where the text is occupied with the continuation of human generation: „Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men” (191d).

It is quite obvious that the androgynous (father to adulterers of both sexes) does not enjoy the maximal valorisation (from Plato) by the Renaissance or the modern times. On the contrary, if we are to pay attention to the hierarchy of the three primordial races, the androgynous is clearly not favoured, being eligible for a second place at best. From the female-being come „female companions”, lesbiens respectively, and from the male being come men who „follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths” (191e-192a). There is little doubt who the champion of the human race is: the double male being. Plato through Aristophanes’ voice chooses, all the men who parted from it as the most valuable and brave, „because they have the most manly nature” (192a): „Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. /…/ And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him” (193b). Surely, the aspiration to the completion of unity is attributed to all three types of the original human beings. We could also ponder on the “seriocomic” when Aristophanes proposes the hypothesis of a reunion not operated by Zeus, the great separator of essence, but by Hephaestus, the artificial repairer of appearances. However, the most famous line of Aristophanes’ speech („this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need”, 193a) will be the basis of the metaphysically “heavy” future recovery of the narration of the myth.

 

Platonic Love – the Real Stake of the Symposium

 

While less discussed in this paper, because it is given extensive attention elsewhere, the main reason for reconsidering the Platonic myth of the androgynous from the perspective of the “seriocomic” and “the folk culture of laughter” or “the culture of folk laughter” is the organization of the entire demonstration on the nature of Eros around Socrates’ speech, where, by means of another narrative artifice, the main voice is that of Diotima’s of Mantineea and where the Platonic theory of love emerges.

Central to the Symposium is the Platonic theory of love, and not the concept of androgynous love. Although told by Socrates – who pretends to remember and reproduce the learnings of Diotima, “a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge” (201d), this particular theory belongs, as commentators say, to Plato himself and its narrative treatment is completely different. The primary emphasis falls on the dialogal representation and maieutic accumulation. After defining Eros as median in nature, a daimon, son of Poros („plenty”, impulse that comes through, overflowing and overfull, impregnating force) and Penia („poverty”, deficit, expectation, openly waiting for the necessary fulfilment, a lack calling to be filled), Diotima teaches the reason of love. The entire demonstration is nothing more but an erotic avatar of the theory of Ideas, because Eros becomes here a wish for absolute beauty, good and truth. Platonic love, gradually shared in a gnoseologic crescendo towards the absolute Beauty, is meant to polarize the whole meaning of the Symposium. Let’s also note that the dialogue stays open over a never uttered response of Aristophanes who, in the end of Socrates’ discourse, wishes to answer to one of his references to his own speech. One last figure of the culture of laughter, one that is being censored now, in the presence of true love and true Beauty, we could say observing the relational nature of Aristophanes’ reccurence. The fact is that, in the context of the Symposium explanation of the doctrine of ideas – fixed at the level of erotics – the recovery and the reinterpretation of the androgynous’ myth can only function as an introductory strategy, a counterpoint for the main demonstration, far from the “hard”, serious and mythical meaning usually given to it.

How can one explain the resistance of the androgynous project as a justification for love, of both metaphysical and mythocratic value? The answer is two folded: on the one hand, the Ficinian comment influenced, with its authority, Platonic exegesis; on the other, imagologically speaking, androgynous love presents a tempting offer: a project that will systematically and harmonically regulate all the anguishing troubles and the unexplainable alteration of the equilibrium of being in love is immensely comfortable, both psychologically (with its reference to “reinstating the lost order and harmony”) and imaginary (with its reference to the non-problematic figure of the sphere, which influenced the Greeks by means of the Pythagoreic round cosmos) or magic-religiously (with its reference to predestined preconditions). The same resistance is reinforced by the link that the Platonists establish between androgyny and magnetism, respectively between the phantasm of androgynous love and one of the favourite phantasms of the Renaissance, regardless of the domain (science, theory of imagination, theory of pneumatic love).

The most important point in favour of a seriocomic perspective on the myth of the androgynous is the fact that the Platonic discourse is proto-novelistic in nature. Both the narrative structure of the dialogue and the contextual introduction of the philosophical learning prove that Plato acts with clear authorial conscience. To his authorial intent the Symposium owes its literary beauty, but also the comic traits that surround the derisory (though fascinating) retelling of one of the dearest myths of erotic humanity.

 

 

Works Cited

(for non-English editions, translations of excerpts belong to the author):

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Probleme de literatură şi estetică [Problems of Literature and Aesthetics], Trans. Nicolae Iliescu, with a Preface by Marian Vasile., Bucureşti: Univers, 1982.

Bloom, Allan. „The Ladder of Love”, preface to Plato’s Symposium, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Ficino, Marsilio, Asupra iubirii sau Banchetul lui Platon [On Love or Plato’s Symposium], traducere din italiană cu o introducere şi note de Sorin Ionescu, (ed. I: Institutul Italian de filosofie, Societatea Română de filosofie, Bucureşti, 1942), ed. a II-a: Timişoara: Editura de Vest), 1992.

Frutiger, Perceval, Les Mythes de Platon [Plato’s Myths], Paris: Editions Alcan, 1930.

Libis, Jean, Mitul androginului [The Myth of the Androgynous], traducere din limba franceza de Cristina Muntean, Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 2005.

Mircea Eliade, Mefistofel si Androginul [Mefistofeles and the Androgynous], 1992.

Plato, Symposium, translated by Benjamin Jowett, published by Middlesex Echo Library, 2006.

Robin, Leon, La théorie platonicienne de l’amour, Paris, Editions Alcan, 1908.

Szlezak, Thomas Alexander, Noul Platon. Cercetări despre doctrina esoterică [The New Plato. Researches on the Esoteric Doctrine], vol. II, traduceri de Ioana Lemenyi, Teona Meheş, Alina Noveanu, Rigan Lorand, Dan Săvinescu, Cluj-Napoca: Grinta, 2008.

Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques, La vie des images, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, La Biblioteque de l’Imaginaire, 2002.

 

 

Notes: