Wow. That's pretty gay.

The other day I read Plato's Symposium for the first time in some fifty years, and was quite taken aback.

I had entirely forgotten how gay and even enthusiastically pro-pederasty that dialogue is.

The dialogue is about love, a topic Plato's Socrates claims in the dialogue is the only thing he actually knows about.

A claim that lends additional weight to the philosophical content of Socrates' speech on the subject, on the whole just as gay as those of the others.

And that comprises the ideas of the philosopher as one who loves and pursues but does not have wisdom, of the philosopher actually achieving intuition of the Form of Beauty itself, and of the philosopher's special claim to political insight.

Alcibiades' speech comes last, right after Socrates', and paints him as having been - with Alcibiades, anyway - an annoyingly chaste homosexual lover of beautiful male youths.

It is interesting that the Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages preserved Plato, the enthusiastic advocate of pederasty, but lost the not so gay (if at all) Aristotle and pretty much stamped out the anti-sex Epicurus.

If I have that history right.

OK, you sold me

On gender distinct from and sometimes opposed to biological sex as a true blue real thing.

And opposing gender being not necessarily accompanied by or accompanying homosexuality.

Who sold me?

Richard K. Morgan and Plato.

Tweaking Aristotle's nose

"The Abominable Bride," the last episode of season 3 of Sherlock.

Holmes remarks, "Fear is wisdom in the face of danger."

Not courage.

Or maybe Plato.

Or Socrates.

Not the same

To expound what justice does to and within its possessor, whether gods and men notice or not.

And to show justice is of value in itself, for its own sake.

Plato, Republic, Book 2.

A life dominated by sex

From about 12 years old to 70, human lives are overwhelmed and absolutely possessed by the sex drive.

And then it slacks off and we almost recover the freedom of children.

But then so few are the years remaining!

The ring of Gyges

Ring of Gyges

Plato, either an extraordinarily brilliant, talented, successful, and influential moral believer or history’s most successful fraud, in The Republic puts in the mouth of his own brother, Glaucon, a little story that Glaucon believes to show any man who thought he could get away with it would be unjust.

The ring of Gyges makes the wearer invisible when the head is turned to the inside of the hand.

Masked by anonymity, the hypothetical wearer of the ring is expected to behave without regard to justice, however rigidly just he may ordinarily be.

Both he and the lookers-on in the story are represented as holding the supposed moral properties of things, actions, and men as of no account.

And Plato's mouthpiece, Socrates, does not contradict Glaucon’s implicit claim that the on-lookers in the tale are typical of the general run of humans, in these regards.

All the same, neither here nor elsewhere does Plato ever seem to contemplate the obvious explanation that moral terms denote nothing, that there simply are no moral distinctions, truths, considerations, or facts for us to take properly into account, and that morality is just a hocus-pocus of social control that is not entirely successfully in duping even the crudest and least educated of people into obedience "when the cat's away."

Wikipedia quotes Jowett, 360b-d,

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.

For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right.

If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

What are you, anyway?

Three notions are regularly played with in popular, mid-level, and higher, academic culture.

1.     In the tradition of Plato and Descartes, you are your soul and your soul = your mind = your spirit = your intellect, a single non-material whatnot existing continuously over a span of time.

2.     In the tradition of Locke, anything that has your memories and your mental traits is you, though these change in varying degrees over time, anyway.

3.     In the materialist tradition, your body or at any rate your central nervous system is you.

As to the first, think Being Human.

As to the second, think Oblivion, Warehouse 13, or Eureka.

[And note that, for the attentive, Oblivion at least contains the refutation of this conception of personal identity.]

As to the third . . . . well, maybe you don’t see that a lot, in pop culture.

Can’t think of anything just now, anyway.

But that’s certainly the idea behind efforts to cryogenically preserve dead bodies until the day medical science is able to restore them to life.

Cryonics

Restore whom to life?

Why, himself, of course. Whosever body that is.

For any variant of materialism, a dead person is a dead body, and the latter is like a broken toaster.

Depending on how bad things are and on the available skills and resources, sometimes a toaster can be fixed and become fully functional, again.

A witty science fiction writer could make a very amusing Whozzat? story with such ingredients, playing these ideas off against each other.

As to materialism, the eliminative kind has the virtue of doing frankly what the reductive variety does surreptitiously.

That is, they both deny the data (pun intended) of experience.

Another form of realism

"Of men we know and of the gods we believe that by a law of their nature the strong do as they can and the weak do as they must."

  - The Athenian representative, the Melian Debate, The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides.

In another post I said that by “political realism” some understand the doctrine that nations, institutions, groups, and even individual political agents seek power and only power for its own sake.

A different understanding is that in the selection and pursuit of their ends humans are overwhelmingly indifferent to others of their kind and neither morals nor religion are significant independent constraints on individual or collective human action.

Or, anyway, not very significant.

Sometimes this is expressed by saying political agents are concerned to protect and advance only their own interests, due allowance - if any - made for personal relations, exceptions, and loyalties - if any.

That is to say, those who count on religion or morals to deter crime in a pinch are reckoning without the strength of incredulity, the flimsiness of faith, and the ability of all but the most unfortunate and hoodwinked to shape their beliefs of either kind – and sometimes those of others – to suit themselves.

Hence, given inequalities of power, the strong ride roughshod over the weak or “the strong do as they can and the weak do as they must.”

Hence the destruction of Blanche DuBois (in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire), whose rule of life she expressed thus: “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.”

Hence the importance to all religions marked by lasting popular success of myths of rewards and punishments in an afterlife, by no means coincidentally including severe punishments for disbelief.

And hence the dose of truth in Thrasymachus’ sophist maxim (in Plato, The Republic), “Justice is the interest of the stronger.”

All the same, the strengths of this sort of view can be over-stated.

Those who dispute how far the Crusaders were fighting for God and how far for personal, worldly gain are disputing the same, or anyway a similar, question that could be and has been raised as well with regard to the Jihaders who in successive waves spread Islam across so much of the world.

And on the other hand it is also possible to grossly underestimate human credulity and the power of superstitious fear.