Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 6

I am not sure I would explain anything Plato wrote with the phrase, "given his own homosexuality." In the first place, anything we say about Plato's own personal behavior is necessarily speculation; in the second, Plato is a sufficiently deep and subtle writer that I believe he could write one thing even while personally preferring something else, ... if that's where he found the argument taking him. And in the third place, you and I both know that Greek sexual behavior can't really be squeezed into modern straitjacket terms like "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality." Heck, I remember a long discussion of the subject with you over dinner once, where we both agreed that in fact there really is no such "thing" as homosexuality at all. There are people who like to do this or that in bed, but the lived experience is broader and more varied than the terminology.

Leaving Plato's private life out of it completely, I must also disagree with the idea that "Perhaps Plato saw no higher purpose in sexual union than pleasure." My reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus makes sexual union into a cosmic principle. Yes, he is always trying to universalize it; yes, there is all this tiresome, edifying verbiage about ascending the ladder of love up to a love of the universal Forms, blah blah blah. But he was always conflicted. Last year I bought a translation of the Symposium that Percy Shelley had written for his own interest. And honestly, you cannot read Socrates' long speech about cosmic love without hearing Plato in the background, clawing at his mattress in a desperate desire to get it on -- a desire that he has obviously forbidden himself to gratify, but that eats away at him daily. I wish I understood his reasons better; it might help me see if there are spots where I have genuinely taken the wrong tack in my analysis above. But I will say at the very least that Plato is certainly the writer who originated a lot of the bland, edifying, anti-erotic rhetoric that we hear today about love, and that he is also the only philosopher in whose writings I can hear any clear recognition of the power of erotic need.