Love

LOVE
Plato: Phaedrus
Thomas Mann: Death In Venice

So this week we looked at the topic of “love” but in a cerebral, philosophical sense, not in a “reality TV sense”. Death in Venice is a short but wonderfully dense book about Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer who becomes obsessed with a young boy while vacationing in Venice. Although this might sound rather sick and twisted, it isn’t if you look at it within the context of some of the books we’ve read this semester. It is an account of what happens to this artist’s inner self as a result of seeing (to his eyes, anyway) the embodiment of a pure, divine Form. What must be considered is that Aschenbach is the personification of dry, Western reason. (p.7): “Preoccupied with the tasks imposed upon him by his ego and the European psyche, overburdened by the obligation to produce, averse to diversion, and no lover of the external world and its variety, he was quite content with the view of the earth’s surface that anyone can gain without stirring far from home, and never so much as tempted to venture beyond Europe.” He is the epitome of the Apollonian in contrast to the Dionysian, and although he possesses everything that Western European culture holds dear (fame, brains, wealth, and a Y chromosome) there is something not quite “right” with him: He is fidgety, socially inept, constantly ill-at-ease and off-kilter. I suggest that this is the physical manifestation of the imbalance hinted at above.

Parallels between Aschenbach and Pentheus (from The Bacchae) are strong. Both live straight-edge lives, so much so that when they are infected with the Dionysian they are overwhelmed by its power and are thus ruined. It is as if, by living so distant from and for so long without the Dionysian, they have no resistance to its virulence, are overcome by it and are unable to recover. Pentheus experiences the Bacchic festivities of the satyrs and revelers in the flesh while Aschenbach dreams about them: (p.126) “…a deep spiritual resistance, and, having run their course, leaving his entire being, the culture of a lifetime, devastated, obliterated. It began with fear, fear and desire and a dire curiosity about what was to come. Night reigned, yet his senses were vigilant, for from afar there approached a din…long drawn-out u - (this must be an echo of p.57, where people are calling out T’s name:) “Adgio or, more often, Adgiu, with a final u they lengthened as they called… he found the euphony appropriate to the object in question and, having repeated it to himself, turned back, contented, to his letter and papers.”
(p.127) …smooth-skinned youths prodding he-goats with leafy staffs, clutching their horns, letting themselves be dragged along and whooping at each leap… Great was his repugnance, great his fear, honorable his intention to defend his domain against the stranger, the enemy of the serene and dignified intellect. But the noise … mountainside … and swelled into raging madness.

After this, one might say that Aschenbach has become fully infected and there is no turning back. He has experienced something so foreign and so true to his true nature that he cannot go back to his old humdrum existence. He will forever be searching for this feeling of life that Tadzio and Venice brought him. It was in Venice, really, that his inner self was stirred and his inner voice found. Ironically, this experience of loving and dying amounts to both Aschenbach’s awakening and his death. He, like Pentheus, taps into something that is inherent to his being (the Dionysian) but cannot handle it after a lifetime of suppression.

Phaedrus

The Phaedrus is very similar to the other Platonic dialogues I’ve read in that Socrates’ comments are usually followed by the words “Of course, Socrates!” It was difficult reading, at times, but love, after all, can be complicated:
(p.9) SOCRATES: …whereas those who happened not to be in love, but achieved what they asked through merit, would not begrudge those who associate with the objects of their attentions but would hate those who did not wish to do so, thinking that they were being looked down on by the latter but benefited by the presence of the former, so that there is much greater expectation that the other party will gain friends than enemies from the affair.
Being able to cut up whatever it is again, kind by kind, according to its natural joints, and not to try to break any part into pieces, like an inexpert butcher; as just now the two speeches took the unreasoning aspect of the mind as one form together, and in the way that single body naturally has form together, and in the way that asingle body naturally has its parts in pairs, with both members of each pair having the same name, and labeled respectively left and right, so too the speeches regarded derangement as naturally a single form in us, and the one cut off the part on the left-hand side, then cutting it again and not giving up until it had found among the parts a love that is, as we say, “left-handed”, and abused it with full justice, while the other speech led us to the parts of madness on the right-hand side, and discovering and setting forth a love that shares the same name as the other but is divine, it praised it as the cause of our greatest goods.
PHAEDRUS: Very true.

One of the main ideas explored here is that our reason and our appetites often pull us in different directions. Appetite desires instant pleasure while reason fancies restraint.

p.16 LOVE DEFINED: the irrational desire that has gained control over any judgement urging a man towards what is correct, and that is carried towards pleasure in beauty - in turn being forcefully reinforced by the desires related to it in its pursuit for the beauty of bodies.

What was very surprising to me was how, at times, the beloved was described as having to be inferior to the lover in order to keep the lover satisfied. The purpose of this seemed to be so that the lover could mold the beloved as he saw fit without giving much freedom to the beloved. A dynamic of such a power imbalance in a relationship makes one uncomfortable. Such a relationship wouldn’t work today, but in analyzing how relationships were in the past, we should be careful not to practice “presentism” and impose our own moralities while reading two-thousand-year-old works. In this light, Aschenbach is partly redeemed for falling for a pre-pubescent boy. These two books, Death in Venice and Phaedrus do complement each other very well in this sense. Indeed, there is a meditation on the Phaedrus in Death in Venice and, as has happened so often this year, I wish we had more time to explore these books in relation to each other. This may very well be part of my final project for the course.