Plato's Symposium
Good day to you, fellow wizards of words and sentence architects. As the sun travels the cloudy, ashen sky above my head here in Romania foreboding a violent storm, I find myself preparing to depart out of town for a metal festival. I hope I won't get struck by lightning, as me and my friends must walk through an open field for quite a significant distance. If I do, well, I guess we'll have toasted writer in the menu booooyys!
Since I won't be here tonight to post today's article/review/whatever this sequence of words I'm laying down on my keyboard is, I'll post it now.
Today we will talk about an ancient erudite, a mighty philosopher, thinker, and writer of Greece. He is renown and recognized as the foundation stone of both old and modern philosophy. Plus, he had an awesome beard!
Since he wrote a lot, I'm only going to talk about what I consider to be his greatest and most influential work, taking in account the society he lived in. We need to understand that greeks valued philosophers and viewed them as teachers, great thinkers, and people who had managed to understand the ultimate truth about the universe back then, so these guys were pretty influential.
Symposium
Let's consider the ancient philosophers as today's pop-stars because that's what they were. Everybody looked up to them and wanted to live the philosopher or the writer life. Hence, you can imagine the impact a book depicting a private conversation between the great figures of the time such as Socrates, the general Alicbiades, Aristophanes, a very famous playwright and a few others had on the contemporary society.
The book describes a philosophical debate on the theme of love (Eros), recognized by the participants both as the erotic love and a trait of courage and valor. Each speaker, since the text is only dialogue, has a different opinion, a different story to tell about the qualities of love, a common trait for the Theory of Forms (we'll discuss this in the future).
We have to mention that the participants are continuously drinking wine throughout their conversation and as the story progresses the whole thing turns into a massive, intellectual rant between the wise men of the time, becoming quite funny.
However, the story is pure fiction, the scene depicted in the Symposium is not a chronicle of a certain boys-night-out, Socrates-style, but just a figment of Plato's imagination, which makes it even more valuable and interesting.
All of these old books might seem boring and irrelevant for people my age since we live in... the society we have today where pop-icons, instant gratification, money, sex, drugs, and shallowness are the things to look up to, but I believe that there are a lot of folks out there who just can't go with the "flow", so they turn their eyes to culture, knowledge, and wisdom, but these boring, dusty tomes shaped the world as we know it today.
Also, try not to judge a book comparing it to contemporary culture, analyze it according to the knowledge humanity possessed at the time the text was written. Considering that people had significantly fewer answers two thousand years ago, the bearded, erudite sir Plato simply proves that he is worthy of all the glory, fame and appreciation that he had and still has after so much time.
Love,
Live,
A Cyberpunk, SF, Fantasy
Culture
Victor Rain
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