#there's no platonic explanation for this >> wrong. plato explained everything

[kebriones]

"there's no platonic explanation for this"

Wrong. Plato has explained everything.

[yessoupy]

yeah, i wasn’t done.

there’s ONE MORE ANGLE of this whole platone/symposium thing that really grinds my gears and instead of explaining it in my own words i’m just going to quote a passage at length. okay? okay. i’ll cut most of it for you. i have painstakingly typed this for you so i expect all you pearl-clutchers and scolds to read every word (and those of you who’ve messaged me for explanations and more information, this is for you as well). marilyn skinner is THE BEST and so here is the first part of the introduction of her text sexuality in greek and roman culture. anything bold is my emphasis and anything [in brackets] is my addition to loop us back to the Issue At Hand. (Also? This is a good explanation of why it matters what the ancients thought. This shit AFFECTS YOU.)

Lawyers have little time for Platonic love [and neither do the hand-wringing scolds who’ve graced my inbox who first heard of pederasty in the tags of another post and decided they knew everything about Plato’s Symposium]. In a trial in America that attracted nationwide media attention, however, one point of constitutional law turned on arguments involving pronouncements about sex by the fourth-century BCE philosopher Plato. Plaintiffs in Evans v. Romer, heard in a Colorado district court in October 1993, were attempting to invalidate an amendment to the Colorado state constitution, Amendment 2, approved by referendum a year before. This amendment prohibited public agencies, municipalities, and school districts from adopting laws or policies granting protected status on the basis of sexual orientation. Its opponents argued that putting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals at such specific disadvantage violated their right to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution because it did not serve legitimate government interests and placed unique burdens on their ability to participate equally in the political process. Plaintiffs also challenged it on First Amendment grounds, including violating violation of the prohibition against the establishment of religion. Since many Christian denominations take the position that homosexual acts are morally wrong without exception, Amendment 2, they alleged, was an intrusion of fundamentalist Christian bias against homosexuals into secular law.

Here is where Plato enters the courtroom. To refute the latter contention, the state called in John M. Finnis, a specialist in moral philosophy, as an expert witness. In an affidavit, Finnis asserted that condemnation of homosexual activity had its basis in natural-law theory, the notion that human morality is governed by inherent principles evident to reason, and was clearly articulated by the founders of the Western tradition of rational philosophy: “All three of the greatest Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically shameful, immoral, and indeed depraved or depraving” (Finnis 1994: 1054). Appearing for the plaintiffs, Martha Nussbaum, an authority on Greek philosophy, contested that claim. Finnis’s understanding of the Greek classical tradition was based on an erroneous reading of poorly translated texts [ahem], she maintained; there was no evidence that ancient philosophers considered same-sex erotic attachments immoral. Condemnation of such relationships “as a violation of natural law or the natural human good” was therefore “inherently theological” (Expert Witness Summary at 2, quoted by Clark 2000:4). By inference, then, it was an establishment of religion.

As an example of what she said were the misleadingly translated passages that had given Finnis the wrong impression, Nussbaum cited the 1926 Loeb Library version of Plato’s last treatise, the Laws. There, the philosopher several times appears to condemn same-sex copulation explicitly, at 636c and again at 836c and 841d, as “contrary to nature.” She testified, however, that the translator, R.G. Bury, had rendered the Greek in keeping with the shame and embarrassment about homosexuality commonly felt at that time, giving it a far more negative cast that was appropriate. In a subsequent article defending her testimony, Nussbaum explained that Plato repeatedly expresses fears about the threat posed to rational judgment by all the physical drives--hunger and thirst as well as sex. He focused on the dangers of same-sex relations in the Laws not because he viewed them as wrong, but because they were “especially powerful sources of passionate stimulation” (Nussbaum 1994: 1580). As for the statements that homosexuality is “contrary to nature,” that is, to the practices of the animal kingdom, Nussbaum noted that they occurred each time in imaginary public pronouncements and construed them as rhetorical devices for convincing the ordinary man. Appeals to animal nature would carry little weight with Plato himself because he would say that a rational being cannot be guided by the behavior of nonrational creatures (1994: 1576-7, 1631, 1633, 1639).

After Nussbaum had finished her direct testimony, Robert George [massive eyeroll], a political scientist from Princeton, was brought in on rebuttal. Ensuing controversy dealt with the correct translation of certain passages of Plato’s Laws and, in fact, upon the single word tolmema (“act of daring”) at 636c, which Nussbaum asserted was morally neutral and her opponent claimed to be pejorative. Both sides based their arguments for the meaning of the word upon the entry given in the most authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek, though they relied upon two different editions of the same dictionary. There is no need to go into all the philological technicalities, or all the courtroom charges and countercharges, whose repercussions continues on in print as fiercely argued follow-up discussions by participants appeared in academic and legal journals. Eventually, both the Colorado District and Supreme Courts found for the plaintiffs, and the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional.

None of the judicial opinions issued by the various courts cited evidence from Greek texts in making a determination. Nevertheless, the philosophical and ethical issues raised in the Amendment 2 case indicate that informed discussion of Greco-Roman sexual protocols has the potential to shed valuable new light on modern controversies about sexuality. What was unfortunate about Evans v. Romer, as observers  have since pointed out, was that the actual courtroom exchanges focused narrowly on Plato’s attitude toward male-male copulation, which is, indeed, of a piece with his distrust of all forms of sexual pleasure, including that provided by heterosexual acts. His well-known insistence that sublimated homoerotic affect, divorced from physical expression, can be an impetus toward moral and intellectual good was not given any weight in testimony, despite the fact that “Platonic love,” as an ideal, is affirmed not only in his early dialogues the Phaedrus and the Symposium but also at Laws 837d, where it is stipulated that “the love belonging to virtue and desiring that a young man be as good as possible” should operate in his model state. ...