One by one the Others Come:
Who is my neighbour? Who is my others? Or to put is differently, how do I relate to that which I do not yet know, and yet, which is awakening in me? When is the thought of the awakening contained?
This thought is the thought of Plato and the position of Eos. Is Eros old? Is Was he young? Or is eros, that most personal of all feelings, merely suspended in the mind? Caught up unlike unripe cheese, which can still be eaten:
A spirit,
The dawning of love, is the dawning of creativity – the dawning of the ability to change a world. The dawning of an action – frozen in the moment. In loving, Plato suggests a moment an action, is really suspended in the moment. And yet what is suspended is not an event as such. NO Deleuzian surfing of the virtual for him. It is rather the feeling of event, the fleeing at a point of humanity, of a commitment (God knows what) to the world, the unpicking of that commitment – the feeling of that commitment already present in the mind, in various forms: Virtual if one like, without be contained in events as such. It is more in the vividness of life, in the lively slip of what its their, of the extra possibilities, that invest a mind like flees or rats.
To Be in love is therefore be caught up with being what one is not, to be in love with a perception flowing in, that one is not yet. A feeling, and affect, that allows one to in claiming love, to change the loved and the lover, a portion of the world, and the seer of that portion in one move. Love becomes suspended between active and passive: never truly either. One loves and is loved. One changes and is changed.
The thought is thereby suspended within a different theory of action. Within what is enacted otherwise. That is, one on the one hand thee are the great divinties, then godheads themselves. These beyond time and space are the world. There are the hidden springs to all thought, the cap heads of thinking.
Or to put is otherwise is suspended between those two great engines of passion and action The world for nature and the world of men. God’s act, volcaneo and heavens explode. Man is passive, and catches the world in a passive synthesis. One yet this is not love.
Or better (and more truthful to the symposium) if is love, love needed to be divided into a higher and lower part. The higher part, which is all male, belongs to the God’s. The Heavenly Aphrodite herself. The love I feel from nature, the love that fashions me, and forces me to encounter the world. The love that renders all humans effectively passive. They are its mere worshippers. Caught up in it actions, in the direction of another Te direction for another. The world is therefore not really hidden spring, do much as the property of somethign else, and we are but itself stooges, caught up in its causal destinies.
On the other, there is the love humans feel for each other. The common form or love or lust. A Love we have for each other. It is of course still a love. It is still caught up in lust. Still caught up in relating to oneself as a scrap of material, a little piece of matter, set in the world. And yet of course this love is a love we directly enjoy. A love than makes us feel active, and the world which bends to ones will then passive.
How this last point is of course a little trying. The first type of love resets (we would say these days I suppose re-programs), r better is indespendible o the last. No human acts, without also expecting a nature, a series of action to respond And yet t remains the case that in the second form of love, humans are the active partner. They love : Or perhaps to follow Greeks society. In this second form, Man is the active, and women the passive (and beyond women nature), man rejoices then in household economy; in being the master of his own destiny, and thought. He might confront the others (a girl bride) but always as its master. Children, slaves, follow a will.
The entire nexus of active passive voices (and all the philosophical diatribes which spin off it), are caught up in these forms of love. Am I the master of the house? Is then Eros of the common sort really also of the first sort? In some apriori fashion?: He love the world we have, because we made that love. The thing we are, made the thing in itself, are perceptions. That is OUR LOVE being divine (that is being Kantain) is the price the world pays, to be seen, had the love that gurantees that other form of common love, the empirical one we have for the world. I
Alternatively, is it the simple right of Aphrodite to be double, to be dualistic to be respected over all other things. Is th common love merely an empirical point, an empirical self, caught up in that other that holy Love, in which it is made (and by which one is rendered so very passive)?
But (still following the cause of the symposium) maybe this dualism itself is what is wrong. Perhaps it would be better to rework what humans are. To thinks of them as the mankind of monster that was able to live at once, on both sides of a dualism. They are neither one thing nor the other – but both. This was Aristophanes answer to the riddle.
If that was the case, then the dualism separating man and heaven was a think of nothing. It was not worth anything. Man could easily rise up and storm the palaces of the Gods. The Monster union was itself the most powerful thing in the world. The Dualism is then imposed on man by the Gods. But this is now not a dualism of god with god, active-passive with passive-active, so much as a dualism of the spirit. The soul is divided from itself. Humans are pitched into the world incomplete. The Divine in this is then the linked to a traumatic event. There servering of humans from the ability to conqueror the dualism, from being the monster who can be two things at once. Live is the quest to behind ones monster hood. One finds it, one feels complete only within another mind which somehow reflect what one is. In another (as long as it was the correct soul partner) one becomes almost a match fo the Gods.
The Dualism of God and man, is replaces by a one of act, imposed by the gods, casting man of from his actual (monstorous) nature), and the subsequent quest to regain that nature.
It is at this point (more or less Socrate intervenes. Love needs not to be about active or passive (as Socrates himself can either answer the needs of the conversation or not – the best he can do is repeat the conversation he claims to have had). Socatres here answer the speech between Astrophanes and his own, which claimed that all the speech thus far had seen love only from here side of the passive the lover and not the loved, whose thought must also be considered). Socrates pitching himself in the middle ere, suggests that this considering is not so very simple. It is not simply that one must think of a space which is either active or passive, but rather that one suppose a spirit capable of being caught up in exchanging itself in the world. Love is a process (and yet process implies a production, and their is no product as such here). Love is catching up perhaps into the world. And ability in this catching to create in it, and to create not just oneself, but also the world that one catches up. Love is nothing straight forward or anything dualistic. It is rather then end of duality. The point an exchange or a flipping r a constellation happens between elements world and me, which once separate are no doubt dualistic, and yet are not, as the love happens to be separated (in any form or other). It is at the apex, the cluster of creation.
And yet this creation itself is nothing so very simple. There are many bounds to it. It can be a love one has for a wife, (and so be fixed and simple in custom, that is in dualism) or a craft (and once again find its place in the world. Or another human being. One might be in passion then for twenty years: a love without any need for comsumation: A love which is a challenge to the world (and what one that will be wrapped up by it , is voyeurism and cheap porn). Or one might be the lover of thought itself, and so lost in an odyessy of creation.
To Love is to create – and yet (as the jealous God must) that creation is bounded by what it is creating. The dualism threatens love at all sides with certainty It wants to make is something 9aseveryone wants to divine socrates and his love)
It wants that love to be faithful to it (in some ways). This is the problem of alcabides. The problem of wanting to woo Socrates. The problem of being jealous, and of an individual wanting to own what can never be there.
The problems though start when this does not happen. What does it mean to renounce this love: that is what does it mean to accept that reality of knowledge as something that belong to another or may be also to oneself). This problem breeds two types of response.
On the one hand there are the sophistis the voyeurs of life (or young men). Those who know that what is there is not ever simply to be owned (by anyone),and yet run from that though to the thought that means they can own a part of it, a piece of it and that might be enough. This might seem innocent, and yet it misses of course the point of the lesson. In stead of a fluid generosity of love, one has a series of empirical little loves, all gloriously selfish. One looses the love back into a dualism therefore. One claims it simply as oneself (as what one was claiming): Or better one claims ones own position in it – and rejoices, over point ( hence Aristophanes claim Socrates speech for his own – or rather claims to have had a part of it: He here only the fact that his witness mattered to it: That he also matters, and is so lost).
Voyeurism and the claim to share of the unattainable as the unattainable, and yet do so is the desire to have the thought as one OWN, ones OWN experience is the nightmare which haunts the Socratian form of love – losing it is pointless gluttony of waisted opportunity and thought: Hiccups and sneezes haunt the love of the voyeur, making him a clown or a fool.
The alternative response (which is perhaps why Socrates the educator cannot answer the conservation for himself –rember Xenophon’s Socarates here) is that o the busy body. The chaperone arranging love, and thinking they know what it is: The organizer, who imposes upon it a neat little dualism, and demand that every flirt is resolved in some way (even if that way is necessarily violent and problematic). Passions (as opposed to affects –that is owned rather than unowned feelings, become the norm).
Duality is thereby either imposed internally in the system, by those whose better nature can be aroused without being inspired to the necessary fluidity of relating: Alternatively it is imposed either directly from outside (one must arrange a split, one must resolve this in someway – even if that way includes a judicial murder) . Alternatively one might watch the debauchery from outside. One might then draw it off into plays, be those plays the Clouds, which lampoons knowledge from the outside, or tragedy which seeks to join directly within in it, while showing it to another (which is why do not doubt an unsolvable conversation has the two as one and the same),
The light footed spirit of love is however quite elsewhere. that these attempt at resolution. It eludes any real attempt to simply define knowledge, while being utterly productive of it . It is a friend and ally of the good, and not the form therefore. it is what allows perhaps one to participates in the illumination of the light or the good, as it shines upon the forms. It is the quest which gives one knowledge. That knowledge might well be divine (God’s are there) and yet, to be knowledge at all, it does not, and cannot start at that point. It starts rather with idea the light and love of the good, which challenges it unpick what it thinks, or rather to repack and restitch it: what is allowing the good in, allows knowledge to matter. That is, in engaging with its world as love, as acceptance, ain action in forming, allows a world o ‘forms’ which is utterly unpasssive or active) is rather a matter of creation beyond the world of simple (and always dualistc) continuity.