Symposium

It kind of goes against the whole point of this blog to think about what to put into it. This should be impromptu notes on whatever comes to hand - nonetheless, I've been planning to start this thing for a while, and I had various ideas about what would be discussed in the first post - lately I had been assuming it would be Nietzsche, probably 'the WIll to Power' - maybe a religious book, a book on religion, Tacitus, Suetonius, or some sort of pulp fiction. It just so happens that at the moment I'm obliged to read a book of essays on Plato's 'Symposium', which couldn't be more fitting. Ideally this blog should be the next best thing to the sort of drinking parties we can no longer have, now that all the authors here live in different countries. I rarely get much out of academic conferences. I generally find it much more productive to sit at home and read for myself than to sit and listen to lectures, maybe because I'm a bad listener, maybe because I'm slow and like to be able to linger over a sentence for a while until I'm sure I understand it (not that I don't occasionally breeze through a text without understanding much of anything)... but I also think that few people speak as well as they write, that conversations don't bring much in overloud groups and with monologues as opposed to dialogues, there's no real advantage to having a speaker physically present. In the university I rarely, is ever, find myself in a situation as intellectually stimulating and fruitful as sitting in a wine bar in Berlin 'til all hours with a few people I like and respect, whose reading habits and interests overlap with while differing considerably from mine.
Proust felt that friends and the institution of friendship were thoroughly worthless for intellectual development - you never think as intensively as when you are alone with book, pen and paper, or even just thoughts. A superficial self comes forward whenever you talk to others - you are always aware of the impression you are making, you always tailor your thoughts and words to the situation. You can never be as honest with others as you are with yourself, and in order to keep a conversation going you must formulate thoughts quickly - move from one thing to the next rather than ruminating over ideas, slowly crafting ideas. A private self is a completely different person from a public self - the former comes out on a page while the latter is the only one present in conversation, even with the closest of friends. Of course Proust had plenty of friends and no doubt vastly underestimated how much he learned from them - and not just in the ways he imagined. His narrator extracts many of his rules of existence discovering the inconstancy of others, the images that come out as one illusion after another about the people he knows is shattered. He also learns watching himself - seeing his own inconstancy, seeing the illusions and dreams he builds up around friends as well as lovers, the desire to connect on an impossible level - to know and possess other people, and he discovers it isn't possible. What he doesn't write about is being surprised and contradicted - being forced to add to or amend his own thoughts - coming across stray subjects and insights that he never would have come to on his own, having facile assumptions shown up and destroyed, consciously and intentionally by an intelligent friend... being given a useful book, or having an alien topic brought to life and made interesting. We are all lazy when we think in a vacuum - and while you, hopefully, bump against things that challenge you and change the direction of your thoughts in the books you read, sometimes you won't happen across the book you ought to be reading if no one is there to suggest it to you. Proust is, oddly enough, a platonist who has no faith in dialogue and nothing but contempt for philosophers (he believes that philosophers believe in their own philosophic good will, their disinterested love of truth, while he believes that a search for truth is always interested, that it is always driven by desire and meant to serve a purpose - an idea he probably took from Nietzsche, but which has its place in the Symposium as well - at least in my reading of the Symposium). Oddly enough, Plato isn't really all that great on dialogue either... apart from Diotima, what dialogue partner ever taught Socrates anything? When is Socrates ever not in control of a conversation - when is he genuinely surprised, thrown off or forced to change his ideas? Socrates can have no true friends because he has no equals... in a way he supports Proust's ideas in arguing against generic representatives of various schools of thought - each time dealing with a set of ideas he must have encountered in the past and ruminated on before each dialogue begins - granted it would probably be an unreadable and interminable dialogue if Plato had tried to present the whole long process of reading and thinking, giving the skepticism and enthusiasm that should go along with coming to fully understand a complex set of ideas, slowly adopting and adapting the best parts of them.

But I've very much lost my way, and started talking wishy-washy nonsense. I got too general in talking about Plato and Socrates, which, I must admit, I haven't yet really read enough to do (plus I disagree with a fair amount of what I just said. I didn't want to write an encomium of Friendship amongst intellectuals - nor do I wish to suggest that the only purpose of friends is to advance you in your thinking. This is first entry is all still just on the use of drinking parties - and the need for virtual drinking parties, where, not being able to all be physically preset, we have to settle for speaking in turns, barely less constrained than the characters in Plato's symposium.
At the rate I'm going, it would take me a lifetime to deliver any proper discussion of the Symposium - not having mentioned a single character, scene, or idea from the book yet - and I imagine I will write on it off and on for quite a while. I feel I've made a bad start and would have almost done better to do nothing more than record a couple of nice lines or statements from a book I was reading or write down an interesting factoid - for instance:
in two different sixteenth century books I read that polar bears are born little balls and the mothers form the babies by licking them into shape - fashioning arms and legs and heads, etc. I wonder how that idea arose and when it disappeared.
two sentence entries are fine. As are five page responses to two sentence entries. I hope this blog will be as varied as possible and often amended.