Plato, Epictetus, & Nietzsche When We Discuss

Plato, Epictetus, & Nietzsche When we discuss how Plato presents the most appropriate human attitude toward bodily appetite and/or passion, it is vital to note that Plato's method of discussing philosophy in dialogue -- as though this were a drama with characters each competing for attention, but with an overarching dramatic structure above and beyond those chattering characters which more subtly guides the way we are meant to understand the competing arguments -- makes it difficult to say what Plato himself thought about the question of bodily desire, because the Symposium's dramatic structure may give the climactic pride of place to Socrates's speech, but then seemingly Plato directly undercuts the loftier sentiments of Socrates's discourse on love by ending it with the farcical entry of the drunken Alcibiades.

So this is important to notice before examining Socrates's vision of the bodily appetites -- in this case, specifically the sexual appetite -- that we remember its philosophical idealizing may be intentionally and comedically brought back down to earth by the spirit of drunken lustful merriment that raucously changes the tone in the last moments of the dialogue.

The Symposium in this case feels more like a one-act play than a philosophical disquisition, and so it is worth noting its dramatic aspects: in a late-night drinking party, in which cups of wine were exchanged in an attitude of presenting one's own learned rhetorical display on a set topic, Socrates and others -- including the comedian Aristophanes -- are asked to discourse on Love.

After having heard the views of a medical man and a comedian, Socrates gives us the philosopher's view of love, by means of recounting his meeting once upon a time with the wise woman Diotima. Socrates's recounting of this past discourse with an intelligent woman (something of a rarity in the 5th century Athenian milieu of Plato's dialogues) is what gives us the popular notion of "Platonic love," used now as a sort of debased euphemism for non-sexual love.

But Socrates's -- or Diotima's -- description is actually much more subtle: the idea is that the love process involves a kind of idealization, such that it feeds upon itself. What is being phased out of existence is, in a sense, the physical or bodily element.

Socrates seems to indicate that the final love is the love of wisdom, for that is literally what "philosophy" means -- in other words, that the idealizing qualities of a mind in love, which work so imperfectly in actually idealizing a physical human being with his or her own physical urges, desires, and aversions, work far better when applied to the intellectual sense of idealized categories or ideas.

But one way or another, Socrates ends up likening it to a heavenly beauty and glimpse of the soul's immortality, which lies at the end of a love which has evolved out of the "toils" of actual physically embodied and fully sexual love.

As Diotima puts it: He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)-a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning.

(Jowett, 48-9.) In other words, sum up Plato's concept of the bodily aspects of desire as something to be idealized out of existence -- such that love becomes the means whereby we glimpsethe wondrous beauty of an eternal and everlasting nature -- although the abrupt comic entrance of Alcibiades shortly after this lofty speech seems to undercut the heady philosophizing accorded to the subject which can be reduced to bodily instincts.

Seeing desire as nothing more than a bodily instinct is pretty much the starting point for Epictetus understanding of the same topics, in a philosophical school formally known as the Stoics, and not to be confused with lower-case stoicism, which is a sort of popularized debasement of the actual philosophical concepts at stake here, in the way that "platonic" love in today's slang is a far cry from "Platonic" love in the philosophical sense.

For Epictetus, Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions -- in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or that is, whatever is not our own doing.

(White, 11.) This makes a fairly strong statement in terms of the understanding of one's desires or impulses -- or even aversions, for here Epictetus seems to suggest that sexual desire (or appetite) expresses itself in terms of what one does not desire as much as it does in terms of what one does desire: in the way that lesbianism sometimes expresses itself as "I don't desire men" as much as it announces "I do desire other women," in the arguments that Judith Butler among others have made, by way of explaining a desire in itself that seems (to many) contranatural, and therefore well within the realm of what Epictetus might conceive of as being "up to us" or within the personal realm of control.

That is why Epictetus ends up being a philosopher who is concerned with questions of pain and injury -- and reminds us that, if you remove the acknoweldgement of injury, if you take away the statement "I have been injured," what actually remains? Either a tangible physical sensation or else (in the case.