More Lessons From Plato

In today's reading, children, we learn how to cure hiccups, and the origin of the euphemism "Greek Culture".

Hiccup Cure

When one of the Symposium guests has an attack of the hiccups, Dr. Erixymachus advises:

....let me recommend you to hold your breath, and if this fails, then to gargle with a little water; and if the hiccough still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; if you sneeze once or twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go.

Apparently, the traditional folk remedies have a longer history than I had imagined. However, none of them sound like as much fun as this one:










In case you're wondering: it worked. And speaking of sex, that brings us to....

Greek Culture

The diners elect that they will discourse on the topic of Love. The first oration is given by Phaedrus, who speaks of the custom in their society, that an older man would take under his wing a youth. The relationship is one of companion and mentorship, but obviously goes beyond simple instruction and advice:

For I know not any greater blessing to a young man beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth.

The following speaker, Pausanias, distinguishes between two types of love, which respectively emanate from the "common Aphrodite" and the "heavenly Aphrodite".

But the Love who is the son of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul....

The goddess who is his mother is far younger, and she was born of the union of male and female, and partakes of both sexes. But the son of the heavenly Aphrodite is sprung from a mother in whose birth the female has no part, but she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths only, and the goddess being older has nothing of wantonness. This who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature....

And in choosing them [ie. a man choosing a youth] as their companions, they mean to be faithful to them, and to pass their whole life with them, and be with them....

....and the coarser sort of lovers ought to be restrained by force, as we restrain or attempt to restrain them from fixing their affections on women of free birth.

Another speaker, Aristophanes, tells an origins myth, according to which humans were primevally double, having four arms, four legs, two faces, and so on. Moreover, there were three sexes: male; female; and the androgynous union of the other two, and each human individual comprised parts of all three sexes. But these humans rebelled against the gods, who as punishment, divided them each in two parts, the navel being the spot at which the skin on the cut surface was drawn together and re-sealed. And ever since then, every human has been seeking for their lost other half, that they may be whole again -- hence, the idea that each of us has a soul-mate, a perfect life partner. He goes on (emphasis mine):

....and after the transposition, the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest and go their ways to the business of life...Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lascivious; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous and lascivious women: the women who are a section of the woman don't care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But the men who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being a piece of the man, they hang about him and embrace him, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. 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 are our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saying. And when they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, which they do, if at all, only in obedience to the law, but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him.

So there you have it: to the old Greeks, not only was gay OK, but in some ways even superior to us straights. Suck on that, fans of "traditional marriage"!

PS: An Anachronism

Being currently under the pleasant post-prandial influence of a couple of glasses of Pelee Island Merlot, I must mention that a few pages later, a drunken Alcibiades refers to the proverb "In vino veritas" (if you don't know what that means, I'm sure that Google Is Your Friend). Which prompts the question: Why is a pre-Roman Greek quoting proverbs in Latin? Or equivalently: Why did the legendary Jowett choose to translate a (presumably) Greek phrase into Latin, as part of his English translation of the text?

(Thanks to my Lost-and-Found Other Half for taking dictation on the lengthy Aristophanes excerpt. Half way through, it occurred to us that the text is doubtless available online).

Drinking Philosophically?

So, being respectably ahead on my book club reading, I took a break from that to read a Pratchett (Making Money. Amusing, but sort of disjointed and not up to the usual standard). Having finished that, I decided to start reading some Serious Philosophy. Plato's Symposium, to be precise. Like much of Plato's output, the work is a dialog on philosophical subjects, placed in a fictional narrative framework. In this case, the frame narrative is a dinner party given by one Agathon, a playwright.

This morning on the bus, I got through about four pages, enough for the characters in the story to have a short discussion and reach their first conclusion. And what pearl of wisdom did they arrive at? What eternal verity hath the father of Western thought bequeathed to us?

They decide that the meal will be served teetotal, as most of them are still suffering hangovers from yesterday's boozing.

And I bet you thought that it was only in Monty Python that philosophy was so much fun.

An Argument For Belief

This is my first response to a comment Sombfaa left on a previous post. I know it's been a while since the post, but the last few weeks have been very busy, and I haven't had time to write a longish, properly thought-out essay (the first MMP post being the exception, as it was time-sensitive and had to take precedence).

Introduction & Recap

You write:

As far as the question of the existence of God is concerned, rather than evidence, I see a set of observations about the world that seems to me entirely open to interpretation. Let me give an analogy:

I love my husband. This is what I experince. While it is possible to claim that what we call "love" is a matter of genetic and social programming or elctrochemical impulses, I reject an explanatory framework that negates the validity of my experiences. It seems to me too much like soplipsism.

Is there a way to prove that love is real or to prove that scientific reductionism is the correct view? I do not think so. It is not a question of evidence for one and not for the other. It is the same evidence, interpretted differently, for both.

I experience the existence of God. While some people may wish to attribute this to misfiring axons, delusions or whatever,I prefer a framework in which I can trust my own experiences.

I take this to be intended, not as a logically compelling argument for the existence of God, but as a more modest attempt to justify belief in God as a rational choice, in the face of ambiguous evidence. However, I find that the first part which discusses the ontology of love is incoherent, and its connection to the second part is seriously flawed.

The Ontology of Love

While you have said what you think love isn't, you haven't said what you think it is. Related to that, you have not explained in what way you think that a neurological account of love "negates the validity" of your experience.

The experience of feeling love (or any emotion or thought) is real -- it's a real feeling, in the mind of the subject. By definition, no one else can feel your feelings as such, but the emotional lives of normal humans are standardized enough that we can recognize each other's feelings from their description. Moreover, the feeling of love usually leads to characteristic behaviours which we all recognize -- if (hypothetically) you consistently and unrepentantly treated your husband badly, we would have grounds to question the sincerity of your claim to love him. What I'm getting at here is that the experience of human love (whatever mechanism may underlie it) seems a reasonably well-established phenomenom, and "real" enough on that count.

As for the underlying mechanism of the experience, all the data we have indicate that love (and everything else we feel or think) is produced by the network of neurons inside our skulls. PET imaging technology is at the point where we can see thought and emotion happen in the brain, in real time, and know exactly what regions of the brain are associated with what kinds of mental states (currently at rather low resolution, but that can only improve). This is backed up by studies of brain-damaged patients -- physical damage to specific areas consistently produces characteristic deficits in cognition, emotion and behaviour. I suggest you read up on cases like that of Phineas Gage, or Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. And of course we all know how simple chemicals, taken either medicinally or recreationally, can profoundly alter mental functions. From this I draw two lessons:

1. Observable brain activity associated with characteristic mental states seems plenty "real" to me -- real in the same sense as the chair I'm sitting in, or the computer I'm typing on (or the electrons and transistors that make it work -- even if I can't see them). What more "reality" do you need?
2. Explaining mentition in terms of neurology doesn't prove there isn't "something more" to it, but if you still insist that there is a ghost in the machine, then I have to ask: where is it, and just what is it doing?
   

Another kind of "reality" you may be trying to invoke is the claim that human love finds its source in some Ideal Realm (identified by Christians with the Mind of God), and that without that "grounding" it is in some way rootless, or liable to dry up at a moment's notice. I have some sympathy for this view, having been heavily influenced by C.S.Lewis' Neoplatonism during my Christian period. However, in time my affection for Platonic Forms just wore off -- I came to see that at best they added nothing to (and at worst obstructed) actual understanding of my experiences, which are stable phenomena studiable in their own right.

Note that I do not claim that scientific reductionism is the "correct view"; I only claim that it is the view which allows us to make progress in understanding the world (including ourselves). In rejecting that as an "explanatory framework" (under the belief that it "negates the validity of" your experience in some unspecified way) you are in fact rejecting the only framework which actually explains anything, in favour of a pseudo-explanation logically indistinguishable from "It happens by magic!" So: I do not find your alternative to be an interpretation of the evidence so much as a superfluous gloss arbitrarily applied to it.

Mapping Human Experience to Religious Experience

To reiterate a point made earlier: subjective experience is its own justification -- if you feel it, it is a real feeling (even if its neurological correlates are not currently being monitored by EEG or other apparatus). However, your experience of God -- just like your experience of the computer you are reading this on, or the chair you are sitting on -- is both a subjective experience and is taken as implying an objective claim about the external world. Such claims are not justified by the experience alone, but are (potentially) open to verification or falsification against external reality. In my view, crossing that category boundary invalidates the isomorphism between your experience of love for your husband and your experience of God.

Conclusions

1. A reductionist, neurological account of subjective experience does not compromise its reality in any meaningful way that I can see.
   
2. Subjective experience is at least largely neurological, and there is no compelling reason (nor any explanatory value) in postulating additional components to it.
3. There is not a valid isomorphism between the claims following on the experience of love, and those following on the experience of God.
   

I conclude that your analogy fails, and cannot justify a rational "choice of faith".