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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
 Posted - Aug 04 2007 : 11:38:11 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
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Originally posted by Sarah Schwolert
This is my interpretation [of what you seem to be suggesting]; please tell me if I am getting the point or not. For example, if I received my undergraduate degree in Nursing, then instead of choosing a specialty and continuing on to higher education, my further education would be universal making me sort of a “jack of all trades.” Then I would continue my ascent to higher knowledge in philosophy.
Yup. I do think this is what Diotima calls for, except that the phrase 'jack of all trades" is a part of a familiar saying that ends "and master of none," and I think that there can be no doubt whatsoever that what Diotima would call for is a genuine mastery of all the "trades"—except she isn't talking about trades. She's talking about what she herself calls sciences—bodies of theoretical knowledge. She doesn't think of the initiate she's talking about as a person who is going to be going into something like nursing or business or anything that involves mere technical know-how. What she envisions is pretty clearly an education for what might be called "statespeople" -- the men and women who might give birth to genuine virtue -- real human excellence -- in themselves, their fellow citizens, and the cities in which they live by rising to the level of genuine leadership within the political community. In other words, her conception of the initiation of the initiate corresponds really closely to the conception Sokrates spells out in Book VII of the Republic of the education of those guardians destined to become the philosopher-kings of the ideal city. There, philosophy proper -- called "dialectic" in that context -- is the thing the philosopher-king-in-training must be prepared for at the end of his or her studies, a preparation he or she is not to be expected to complete before he or she reaches the age of thirty-five). Do you remember this? it's all described in loving detail toward the end of Book VII of the Republic, in the passage that culminates in the decision to allot a final period of five years, between the ages of 30 and 35, to the study of dialectic (537d-539e, 337-340). Once this is finished, these philosopher-kings-in-training are submitted to a regimen of tests (real world tests, it would seem, in the military and in lower-level political office) that lasts fifteen years (!), after which:
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They must be made to uplift the brilliant radiance of the soul and to fix their gaze on that which provides light for all; then, beholding the good in itself, and using that as a standard, they must adorn city and men, yes, themselves also, for the rest of their lives, each in turn. Most of the time (this is after they're fifty!) must be spent in philosophy, but when their turn comes, they must labour hard yet again in politics; rulers they must each be, for the city's sake, doing it not as a beautiful thing, but as a necessity. And so educating others to be like them, they must leave them as guardians of the city in their place [thereby reproducing their kind!], then depart and dwell in the Islands of the Blest; the city shall make public monuments and sacrifices in their honour, as holy spirits, if the Pythian oracle concurs, or else as men happy and divine."
Plainly, this is not an education to turn out people for careers of any other sort than that of ruler of the city. In modern American terms, assuming we could talk Sokrates into thinking well of our form of government, this is the education that would be prescribed for all those who are to hold high office in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government -- an education very different from that which produces our current stock of lawmakers, governmental executives (including the president and vice-president), and judges! No longer would it be possible for a person with a career as an insect exterminator such as Tom DeLay (that was his actual line of work, you know!) or the son of a rich father who had risen to worldly prominence in the oil business and then as the owner of a baseball team, such as our current President, to rise to power in the government. Only philosophers would be eligible, and this doesn't just mean people who have had a little philosophy before getting properly trained in insect extermination or hotel management, or nursing, or doctoring, or the (olive) oil business, or the business world, or the financial world, or the sports world, or the world of news and entertainment, or any of those other careers, low or high, to which most folks even in Sokrates' ideal city, would be destined. You do understand that Plato's Sokrates never envisions the sorts of education we're talking about here -- the education of the philosopher-kings he describes in the Republic and the education of desire he has his Diotima describe in the speech he gives in the Symposium -- as education for the masses or even for the majority. Plato plainly has him describing these educational programs as educational programs for an intellectual and moral elite.
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If that is what you are suggesting, I would say that these roles should be flip-flopped. It seems to make more sense to me that first one would seek philosophical knowledge, seeking wisdom and trying to leave behind ignorance. Then, one would move on to higher education in a specialized area, for me nursing, after already having the basic wisdom and overall knowledge needed for life.
I understand. But you're not thinking of an education for philosopher-kings, are you? What you call "the basic wisdom and overall knowledge needed for life" is something Plato's Sokrates might well describe as "the cunning and savvy that members of the artisan class need to stay alive." Now, I'm not sure you'll admire what Plato's Sokrates is talking about once you really get clear about what it is. I'm not at all sure that the historical Sokrates would have admired it! But we don't want to confuse what Plato's Sokrates is talking about with our own fond ideas about what would be good. Almost surely, he would see you and me as a couple of horribly uneducated people mired in sheer opinion when it comes to the really important things in life. Plato's astounding sense of his massive superiority and the massive superiority of the people he sees as his equals, not only to the masses, but even to the masters of the various trades and arts and sciences comes perfectly naturally to him given his ideal of an intellectual/moral philosophical aristocracy, and its something we mustn't ever, ever underestimate if we want to do justice to his position. For Plato, serious work in philosophy isn't possible until one has become the sort of "Renaissance Man" I describe in that footnote. Once one has become not only a Leonardo da Vinci, but a Galileo and a Hobbes and a Descartes as well, to stick with the Renaissance and early modern period for our stock of exemplars) -- then one might become a Platonic Sokrates and a member of the ruling class -- an educated human being. |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 04 2007 : 11:54:09 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Hannah Moir
I find it interesting how Diotima talks about how once one has reached the final and purest of beauty that one is looking for, one knows that one has reached it.
Do you find this interesting, Hannah? Or do you find it appalling? (Or are you just pretending to prefer not to tell it like you think it is?)
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Once again, I make the argument that everyone has a different feeling towards what true beauty he or she is seeking.
Well, once again you say this. I don't see any argument here.
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So is there a chance that everyone has his or her own staircase? One person's staircase might be shorter or longer than another's.
You could be right; you could be wrong. Who knows? If you want to convince us that this is so or even that it could be so, convince us -- don't just keep repeating -- that beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. You write like a person who has yet to read anything that either Sokrates, in the dialogues, or I, in my lectures, have said about argumentation.
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Then I get a little confused as to why, once one has reached the top level, the beauty is non-human and without human characteristics, yet it takes a man-made staircase to reach the final level. If this beauty is non-human, than how can a human-made object possibly take us to it?
The staircase isn't man-made. It's a ladder of love. Love isn't a human being. Love is a spirit. Love is a daimon. the staircase or ladder -- the educational program Diotima is talking about -- is one that has been fashioned by love, by eros, by philosophy, by the love of wisdom. This is more than human. It isn't divine, but it isn't merely human. You write like a person who has yet to read the first part of Sokrates' speech!
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Is it possible as well, that maybe once one has reached that beauty, it will, over time, lose its beauty, leading one actually go back down levels? Beauty in conversations and physical beauty are the things drive us as people to seek and pursue a life with another who lets us see the beauty that makes us love him or her. I agree with Diotima that beauty is not just physical, but that it is in everything we want and do, we inevitably are attracted to finding true beauty that makes us happy. It is completely possible, and this has occurred, for people to fall out of love. They lose the beauty they once had. Maybe they didn't even really find it but thought they did. As time goes on, all of us change and adapt and grow, so isn't it true that our beliefs about beauty can change as well?
You ask: "Isn't this possible?" Answer: sure, if Diotima is wrong and you are right. So. Convince us you are right. Convince us she is wrong. For heaven's sake, try to convince us of something!
Also: you keep mixing up such things as a person's losing her beauty and a person's ceasing to be seen as beautiful. Don't you think these are really rather different things? One's a change in the person who is actually losing her beauty and becoming ugly; the other is a change in her one-time admirers. People don't go in for cosmetic surgery and botox treatments because they think people's beliefs about their looks have changed! |
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Tara Adler
Apprentice
24 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 04:16:20 AM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan
But just so you don't imagine that you can figure out what forms or ideas in Plato's (or Plato's Sokrates') sense of these terms by reflecting on what you mean by these words when you have occasion to use them, let me just state categorically and dogmatically that this is impossible. The reason it's impossible is that the words "form" and "idea" in Plato's writings don't have the meanings they usually have in English at all. They're translations, of course, and the words that they translate are the Greek words "eidos" (plural "eide") and "idea" (plural "ideai"). Both words come from a Greek verb that means "to see," the same root word that gives us (via Latin), the English word "video." So what we're talking abouthere is a whole lot closer to videos than it is to what we usually have in mind when we speak of forms or ideas. (Imagine that: Plato's Sokrates' Diotima tells the young Sokrates that at the pinnacle of the training of the initiate, he or she gets to see the video to end all videos. It isn't, of course, at all like the videos we see on TV. In fact, it's completely unlike anything we've ever seen with our eyes at all. It's completely motionless and unchanging, for one thing. For another, it's eternal: uncreated, indestructible; it's existed forever and will go on existing forever (more accurately, it exists beyond the confines of mere space and time). But wow, is it ever cool: like all the videos in the realm of the perfect videos, it's absolutely perfectly what all the ordinary visible things that are the least bit like it are only imperfectly. This one is absolutely and perfectly beautiful, because it's the video we call "the beautiful itself." Wowie!
These videos motionless and unchanging, eternal and indestructible, seem a lot to me like the form of beauty. It's invisible, eternal, and unchanging. So many things in the world can grow and change and lose their beauty (or at least what passes for beauty with those who think of it, so many people do today, as something on the surface or even something only a little deeper than that.) It's as the saying has it -- the one that goes something like this: Don't marry someone who is wealthy because money isn't always there, and don't marry someone for his or her beauty because even that fades. So many things fade and grow old. To me the forms are things that do not fade, things that aren't tarnished by imperfection. They are flawless and perfect.
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan in response to a message of Hannah's
[Y]ou keep mixing up such things as a person's losing her beauty and a person's ceasing to be seen as beautiful. Don't you think these are really rather different things? One's a change in the person who is actually losing her beauty and becoming ugly; the other is a change in her one-time admirers. People don't go in for cosmetic surgery and botox treatments because they think people's beliefs about their looks have changed!
On another note, ceasing to be seen as beautiful and losing beauty to me are different things. Because if true beauty is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every person's great beauty is always with him or with her. Or at least that is what I take from Diotima's or Plato's or Sokrates' (whoever the speaker is at the time) forms. But ceasing to be seen as beautiful -- that does happen, and that is another sort of change. For example, people who have been together for fifty years might not see each other as being as beautiful or as handsome as they did when they first met, but they have found a higher form of eros and beauty because they had to, and maybe the higher beauty and love was something they searched for, looked for -- something that would keep them together that long. Am I completely off base here in thinking that?
[Edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 07:40:14 AM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tara Adler
...
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan in response to a message of Hannah Moir's
[Y]ou keep mixing up such things as a person's losing her beauty and a person's ceasing to be seen as beautiful. Don't you think these are really rather different things? One's a change in the person who is actually losing her beauty and becoming ugly; the other is a change in her one-time admirers. People don't go in for cosmetic surgery and botox treatments because they think people's beliefs about their looks have changed!
...[C]easing to be seen as beautiful and losing beauty to me are different things. Because if true beauty is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every person's great beauty is always with him or with her. Or at least that is what I take from Diotima's or Plato's or Sokrates' (whoever the speaker is at the time) forms. But ceasing to be seen as beautiful -- that does happen, and that is another sort of change.
Tara, I certainly think they're different, but I don't think their difference can be established by the argument you offer here.
First, let me commend you for offering a very thought-provoking and nicely crafted argument! It's valid (if its premises were both true, then its conclusion would have to be true as well), and it's quite sophisticated so far as its strategy is concerned. To establish that two things are really two (that they aren't the same thing, that they aren't identical with one another), it's always sufficient to show that a property that one of them has is lacked by the other, and that's exactly what you try to do here: ceasing to be seen as beautiful and losing beauty completely are two different changes, you argue, because the first one can happen, whereas the second one can't.
I think myself, though, that your first premise ("if true beauty is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every person's great beauty is always with him or with her") is one that would be rejected by both Plato's Sokrates and his Diotima (it's always hard to be sure about Plato himself, but if the standard interpretation of the theory of forms really captures Plato's own view, then it'd be rejected by Plato as well). Why? Because the true beauty that's everlasting and never in any way tarnished just is the form, and forms aren't present in particulars; they're completely independent of particulars. Particulars may share in those forms ("partake of them") for a greater or lesser period of time, but nothing guarantees that they will always participate in them. To see exactly why I say this, consider the case of a round ball of modeling clay. It's round. Now the round itself -- the form of roundness in which the round lump of clay "shares" -- is, as one of those forms, everlasting and never to be tarnished, and so it can certainly never lose its roundness: the round itself is eternally round. But that spherical lump of clay? It can easily lose its roundness. If you flatten it on each of its six sides -- the top, the bottom, the back, the front, the left-hand side, and the right-hand side, and you'll bring it pass that it no longer has any roundness at all, having squareness (cubicalness, the shape of a cube, to be precise) instead. Since this is true, it isn't true that "If true roundness is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every round lump of clay's great roundness is always with it," which is the precise counterpart of your first premise.
Having said that, I want to say once again how impressed I am by your having thought long and hard enough to come up with a nice, definite argument in support of your claim -- and indeed one that you've done your best to base on views accepted by the thinker or thinkers you're thinking about -- even if ultimately it doesn't work! Good job!
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For example, people who have been together for fifty years might not see each other as being as beautiful or as handsome as they did when they first met, but they have found a higher form of eros and beauty because they had to, and maybe the higher beauty and love was something they searched for, looked for -- something that would keep them together that long. Am I completely off base here in thinking that?
Well, such things sometimes happen, and at other times, other things happen. Sometimes, people cease to find each other attractive in any sense at all. Sometimes they come to despise one another, to hate one another, to find each other repulsive. So I think people can cease to see each other as beautiful at all. I also think that people can become completely ugly, just as I think that round lumps of clay can become lumps of clay that have lost their roundness altogether.
But there's another angle here you might want to consider. There are certain properties that go hand in hand with certain identities.... Take right triangles, for example. No plane (i.e., Euclidean) right triangle can ever fail to have the Pythagorean property -- that is, the property of being such that the square that can be constructed on its hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) has an area equal to the sum of the areas of the squares that can be constructed on its other two sides. Given this, if you make a triangularly shaped flat piece of clay with a right angle for one of its angles, it will have that property -- and it will never lose that property for as long as it retains its shape (continues to "have" the relevant form). Or go back to that ball of clay we were talking about before. It has the property that every point on its surface is at least roughly the same distance from its center (just how close this is to be precisely true will be a function of just how close the lump of clay is to being perfectly round, and an analogous point can be made about that triangle made of clay). Furthermore, it'll retain that property for as long as it retains its shape -- i.e., for as long as it remains a ball. But destroy that identity, and the property goes right along with it.
For example, make the ball into a former ball, an ex-ball, a ball-that-is-now-history, the mere remains of a ball (think here of the famous Monty Python routine about the dead parrot) -- maybe by making it into a cube! -- and it will no longer have the property in question.
Let's call properties like these properties (properties a thing will have for as long as it exists as a thing of a particular kind) "essential properties." And let's call properties things can lose without ceasing to be things of the kind they are "accidental properties" (an example of which would be having a nice full head of hair in people; it really is possible, as I'm sure you would admit, for people to go objectively bald without ceasing to be people in the process). This is what these two kinds of properties eventually came to be called, and our uses to this day of the words "accidental" and "essential" are rooted in this distinction. Plato is alredy aware of the distinction [see the final argument the soul's immortality in the Phaedo for an example of his use of it], but the terminology -- essential vs. accidental properties -- is one he never uses.
OK. With this nomenclature in place, we can ask now the following question: is it possible that beauty is an essential property of people, if not of their bodies, then at least of their souls? Some might find this an attractive idea. It this could be shown to be true, then we could count on its being the case that a soul that isn't beautiful -- an ugly soul -- is every bit as much a contradictio in adjecto (a contradiction in terms) as a square ball, or a round square, or hot snow, or a thing that's simultaneously sharp and dull (which, in Greek, is a thing that is "oxumoros" -- "sharp-dull" -- i.e., an oxymoron).
I myself doubt that such a thing could be proven, but if it could be proven -- then you'd have a knock-down argument for your claim that persons -- understood as souls and not as bodies -- cannot entirely lose their beauty for as long as they exist as persons. And you know what? This is precisely the strategy Plato's Sokrates envisions for establishing genuine sciences -- genuine bodies of knowledge. What they would consist in is propositions concerning the essential properties of things that have been demonstrated on the basis of fully satisfactory answers to those "What is it?" questions of his, those questions of his about the fundamental natures of things. See the end of the discussion of the divided line in Book VI of the Republic.
So for your present purposes, Ms. Adler, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to try to work out the answer to the question whether anything is essentially beautiful other than the beautiful itself. Are people -- their souls at any rate, if not their bodies -- essentially beautiful? It seems to me that you probably think they are. Could you prove it? Maybe you could, if you could say precisely what it is to be a person. If you could do that, then maybe you could do the sort of thing Euclid did in his geometry when on the basis of careful definitions of such things as lines, angles, right angles, triangles, squares, the areas of squares, and so on, he demonstrated by means of an argument from first principles the theorem traditionally ascribed to Puthagoras: that for right-angled triangles quite generally, the square on the hypotenuse is always equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. But what a strange idea. A geometry of personhood? A science in which all the essential properties of human beings might be demonstrated by proving a series of theorems? Is the idea of such a science ridiculous? Maybe it is. Hannah, for example, will tell us that it is. But its inspiration is plainly Platonic.
You might think that the idea of doing such a thing is ridiculously optimistic, but then think about this, that there was a time when it must have seemed ridiculously optimistic to develop the study of geometry into a rigorous science of the sort that Euclid managed to set forth in his Elements. Is the dream of doing this sort of thing dead? Or is it a dream that can still be dreamed? |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 4:34:22 PM
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AnnouncementA description of the final, along with a copy of the text I'll be asking you questions about on the test, is available now in the new "Exams" folder in the navigation bar. As I've already said just above, the test will become available at 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 10, and will remain available until 8:00 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 13. This represents a decision on my part to push the dates for the final back by three days from the dates and times I originally announced. That'll give you a bit more time to study for the test. I'm hoping you'll find that useful. |
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Megan Lusardi
Apprentice
32 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 7:10:16 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan
quote:
Originally posted by Megan Lusardi
quote:
Originally posted by Paul Hodapp
My example of what I learned from Diotima, to be shared with our workers collective: if I start with beautiful bodies and erotic desire, then I want beautiful bodies in order to have great sex. Then I note that the beautiful bodies I see in the media often are not very good at sex -- too self-absorbed? So the beautiful, sexy bodies are beautiful because they participate in great sex with me. But then I have to make my body beautiful and sexy to share this great experience. Then, as some of you have pointed out, desire for the mere physical drops out and some combination of mental/physical becomes the object of desire. but apparently great sex cannot be enjoyed eternally, so I look for similar experiences (immortality) in art, politics, teaching virtue.
I also believe that the media have made people think that if we are to love someone, he or she has to look beautiful. I do not think that it is necessary to have a great body in order to have great sex, although it does add to the attraction in some cases, but it does not add to the inner beauty that is experienced during sex. If someone has sex with someone else just based on his or her looks then he or she is not doing it to please his or her inner soul, he or she is doing it to please his or her body and more superficial self. If you have good sex with someone you enjoy, then neither he nor she nor you has to be perfect in order to have GREAT sex. It is true that GREAT sex cannot last for eternity, but it can last for as long as you enjoy it. I think that the ideal relationship includes both mental and physical stimulation and if either one is lacking, the relation(ship) can get a little rocky (pardon the pun) because it will be thrown off balance.
Megan, I'm really unclear what you're doing in this message. Is this your example of what you learned from Diotima, to be shared with our workers collective? It's sure hard to read it that way. In any case, could you explain what you're doing -- what question you're addressing yourself to, how this relates to what Paul has posted, how it relates to the topic of this week's thread -- anything that would make it clear how it's a contribution to the discussion of this week's topic: the higher revelations and the education of desire? If you can't, I'm not going to be able to give you credit for this post. See the exchange I had with Emily and Jessica, beginning a couple of days back, on p. 1 of this thread.
All I was doing was agreeing with Paul about the two different sides of "love," and I was adding how I felt. I guess this is kinda what you told Emily and Jessica not to do, so I will try to post again this week or before the 13th so that I can get credit!
[Lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 8:10:10 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Megan Lusardi
...I will try to post again this week or before the 13th...!
Megan, that'll be fine. I'm looking forward to it. I did give you credit for the message you posted back on July 31 even though that one wasn't really very substantial either. It did include some ideas about a remark of Diotima's. So you need to post at least once more before 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday (the 8th) to get your minimum of two messages in this week, and then of course you need to post at least twice in the thread for Week 12. |
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Kolby Davis
Apprentice
28 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 10:20:31 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan
It's easy to find places in Plato's dialogues where Sokrates speaks in ways that suggest that he's a complete agnostic about the whole question of immortality. See, for example, Apology 40a-42a, 445-446. Then there's the Symposium, many passages in which seem to suggest that immortality belongs to the gods alone. It's true that these are passages in which Sokrates is "quoting" Diotima, but it's also true that he tells us that by her speech he finds himself "quite convinced" (212b, 106). And of course there are the impressive pieces of reasoning or rhetoric in support of belief in immortality in the Phaedo (passim), the Phaedrus (245c ff.), and in the Republic (end of Book X). So it's correspondingly difficult to be dogmatic about what Plato or "the dialogues" would have us believe. Presumably, there's nothing they would have us simply believe. What we're in need of, in case we care at all about this subject, is arguments that we find convincing, and few philosophers have found any of the arguments on this subject in Plato's dialogues rationally compelling.
I see what you mean Tom. There might be different ways to perceive the idea of immortality based upon previous readings, and I think that's why I am so confused. I was simply wondering if you had a specific view about immortality in this case. So do you think that immortality is reserved to the gods alone, or can a man achieve this immortality?
I see it as a metaphor depicting how difficult the task is to achieve, seeing as how immortality is no simple task, am I wrong in this thinking, Tom? I just see so many ways to view this immortality that it's making me confused, but maybe that is the point, to have many different ideas about one subject.
[Lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 10:32:14 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
Kolby, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Are you asking if I think that Sokrates' speech in the Symposium should be read as suggesting that immortality may be possible for at least some people -- namely, the good? Or are you asking if I myself believe in some sort of life after death? |
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Kolby Davis
Apprentice
28 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 10:41:54 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
Hey Tom, I know I just posted you a question, so please go ahead and answer that one first, but things this week are kinda slow so I thought I would try to spark up another conversation that others could get their teeth into.
Last week we got to discussing Lecture Six and we finished with your words:
quote:
What this does, of course, is to import a strange and surprising sort of sex education (more precisely: sexual training) right into the heart of the curriculum described in Republic VII. Are we ready for this idea -- the idea, namely, that the naturally horny human beings who are the younger generation have to be helped by someone who has a profound understanding of horniness (i.e., a thoroughgoing grounding in erotics) to become horny for higher beauties and higher goods, and ultimately, for the beautiful and the good themselves? I believe that's what the teaching of Diotima suggests. Ordinarily, sex and philosophy aren't seen as having all that much to do with one another. But here....
Now that I have looked over this a few times Tom, I would like to continue on this because I find it very interesting, and a lot of people seem to be writing a lot on the message board about sexual things, when they should have simply started with this . Ok, so this is one of the few times that sex and philosophy are discussed together, so I had to take advantage.
You believe that the teachings of Diotima suggest that everyone is born with a natural horniness, but they must be taught by somebody who understands horniness to basically be horny for beautiful things. Now I understand this connection with Diotima because of the cave passage and how one must be shown the way to enlightenment, not given it. So in the case of horniness, the enlightenment is the knowledge of erotics? One cannot know these erotics without being enlightened by them?
I only have a problem with this because it is tough for me to make this connection between philosophy and sex, but I just see sex and sexual desire as human nature, something we are born with that matures over time. Or is this enlightenment the actual idea of maturity itself, does a "thoroughgoing grounding in erotics" come with years of experience and maturity, and in this case, might we be our own "teachers"? |
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Kolby Davis
Apprentice
28 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2007 : 10:44:04 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan
Kolby, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Are you asking if I think that Sokrates' speech in the Symposium should be read as suggesting that immortality may be possible for at least some people -- namely, the good? Or are you asking if I myself believe in some sort of life after death?
I am asking Sokrates if Sokrates is suggesting immortality in the literal sense, Tom, and yes, for the good, of course, for it is the good who can achieve immortality, if any man ever does. |
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Kerrie Schafer
Apprentice
22 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 12:28:15 AM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
Kolby says,
quote:
I only have a problem with this because it is tough for me to make this connection between philosophy and sex, but I just see sex and sexual desire as human nature, something we are born with that matures over time. Or is this enlightenment the actual idea of maturity itself, does a "thoroughgoing grounding in erotics" come with years of experience and maturity, and in this case, might we be our own "teachers"?
It is hard for me to make the connection too. Kolby, I had a hard time understanding the paragraph before the one I quoted. Do you think you could explain it in a different way?
Anyhow, I decided to do some research on Plato, homosexuality, heterosexuality, sex, and philosophy, etc. I came across an interesting piece by J. R. Lucas at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/libeqsor/platsex.html called Plato's Philosophy of Sex, originally published in E. Craik, ed., Owls to Athens, Oxford, 1990, ch. 26, pp. 223-231.
The paragraph that I found interesting is:
quote:
Plato's homosexuality has often been cited as the reason for his low esteem of the married state, and at one level this is undoubtedly true. He was attracted to boys and young men, although he became increasingly puritan about the physical manifestations of sex. So far as the physical side of sex was concerned, the saying he reports of Sophocles is illuminating (Republic 329b-c): sexual attraction was a biological fact, to be restrained as much as possible, and otherwise treated as a mere animal necessity, necessary for the generation of guardians, and unavoidable for those who have not the requisite self-control, but not something he could live with emotionally or integrate into his scheme of life. But deeper explanation is called for: it is not simply that he had never experienced the love of a woman, and did not know how much he was asking the guardians to forgo. He knew the power of erotic love, and in the Symposium likens it to divine ecstasy, reaching out to Beauty itself, an ultimate principle of all things, of which the fundamental explanation is, in Aristotle's phrase, kinei hos eromenos. But he draws back. It is the same as with poetry. The purveyors of divine inspiration in the Ion are by Book 10 to be banished from the borders of the Ideal Society. The man who was trying to curb his poetic genius and schooling himself to be properly prosaic could well have reckoned that he should also subject the irrational leap of love to the cold calculations of the eugenics bureau. And perhaps at this level his homosexuality should be seen as a symptom rather than a cause. There is, especially in the Republic, a pervasive sense of turning away from this wicked world, a sense that in the real world real politics is a dirty business, the good man fares ill, and things are inevitably going from bad to worse. [231] The Seventh Letter reveals the biographical background. Plato was emotionally driven out of the Athens that had killed Socrates and the Syracuse that had nurtured Dion, and therefore turned back from the commitment and responsibilities of heterosexual love, to the less deep and more transient fellow-feeling of the adolescent peer-group. His homosexuality represents a certain regression, a turning his back on the world as he found it and seeking solace in the cosiness of a small community in the company of yes-ful youths. He did not just happen to be a homosexual who could therefore forget about sex, but was one because he could not afford to allow his self to become yet more vulnerable as a lifelong lover and beloved.
His statement obviously has given two different views. The view that I like is: quote:
it is not simply that he had never experienced the love of a woman, and did not know how much he was asking the guardians to forgo. He knew the power of erotic love, and in the Symposium likens it to divine ecstasy, reaching out to Beauty itself, an ultimate principle of all things, of which the fundamental explanation is, in Aristotle's phrase, kinei hos eromenos.
Well, I need the definition of "kinei hos ermenos" to completely understand the sentence. I tried looking it up, but I got nothing. Tom, please help! But back to my point, about sex and philosophy. According to my handy Webster's dictionary, Philosophy "is the study of underlying conduct, thought, and nature of the universe." Isn't sex a conduct, thought, and nature? Therefore it is philosophical. This discussion makes it philosophical because as Tom said in the subtitle of Lecture Two, philosophy is an "ongoing conversation." So Kolby, you and I, are asking the wrong questions. Maybe the confusion comes from our lack of understanding and historical background about sex, beauty, and Plato. Hopefully the piece I found, and Tom, and Paul, may help make the philosophical connections we need.
[Lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Tara Adler
Apprentice
24 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 01:18:35 AM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan
quote:
Originally posted by Tara Adler
...
quote:
Originally posted by Tom Trelogan in response to a message of Hannah Moir's
[Y]ou keep mixing up such things as a person's losing her beauty and a person's ceasing to be seen as beautiful. Don't you think these are really rather different things? One's a change in the person who is actually losing her beauty and becoming ugly; the other is a change in her one-time admirers. People don't go in for cosmetic surgery and botox treatments because they think people's beliefs about their looks have changed!
...[C]easing to be seen as beautiful and losing beauty to me are different things. Because if true beauty is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every person's great beauty is always with him or with her. Or at least that is what I take from Diotima's or Plato's or Sokrates' (whoever the speaker is at the time) forms. But ceasing to be seen as beautiful -- that does happen, and that is another sort of change.
Tara, I certainly think they're different, but I don't think their difference can be established by the argument you offer here.
First, let me commend you for offering a very thought-provoking and nicely crafted argument! It's valid (if its premises were both true, then its conclusion would have to be true as well), and it's quite sophisticated so far as its strategy is concerned. To establish that two things are really two (that they aren't the same thing, that they aren't identical with one another), it's always sufficient to show that a property that one of them has is lacked by the other, and that's exactly what you try to do here: ceasing to be seen as beautiful and losing beauty completely are two different changes, you argue, because the first one can happen, whereas the second one can't.
I think myself, though, that your first premise ("if true beauty is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every person's great beauty is always with him or with her") is one that would be rejected by both Plato's Sokrates and his Diotima (it's always hard to be sure about Plato himself, but if the standard interpretation of the theory of forms really captures Plato's own view, then it'd be rejected by Plato as well). Why? Because the true beauty that's everlasting and never in any way tarnished just is the form, and forms aren't present in particulars; they're completely independent of particulars. Particulars may share in those forms ("partake of them") for a greater or lesser period of time, but nothing guarantees that they will always participate in them. To see exactly why I say this, consider the case of a round ball of modeling clay. It's round. Now the round itself -- the form of roundness in which the round lump of clay "shares" -- is, as one of those forms, everlasting and never to be tarnished, and so it can certainly never lose its roundness: the round itself is eternally round. But that spherical lump of clay? It can easily lose its roundness. If you flatten it on each of its six sides -- the top, the bottom, the back, the front, the left-hand side, and the right-hand side, and you'll bring it pass that it no longer has any roundness at all, having squareness (cubicalness, the shape of a cube, to be precise) instead. Since this is true, it isn't true that "If true roundness is everlasting and never to be tarnished, then it can't be lost completely and every round lump of clay's great roundness is always with it," which is the precise counterpart of your first premise.
Having said that, I want to say once again how impressed I am by your having thought long and hard enough to come up with a nice, definite argument in support of your claim -- and indeed one that you've done your best to base on views accepted by the thinker or thinkers you're thinking about -- even if ultimately it doesn't work! Good job!
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For example, people who have been together for fifty years might not see each other as being as beautiful or as handsome as they did when they first met, but they have found a higher form of eros and beauty because they had to, and maybe the higher beauty and love was something they searched for, looked for -- something that would keep them together that long. Am I completely off base here in thinking that?
Well, such things sometimes happen, and at other times, other things happen. Sometimes, people cease to find each other attractive in any sense at all. Sometimes they come to despise one another, to hate one another, to find each other repulsive. So I think people can cease to see each other as beautiful at all. I also think that people can become completely ugly, just as I think that round lumps of clay can become lumps of clay that have lost their roundness altogether.
But there's another angle here you might want to consider. There are certain properties that go hand in hand with certain identities.... Take right triangles, for example. No plane (i.e., Euclidean) right triangle can ever fail to have the Pythagorean property -- that is, the property of being such that the square that can be constructed on its hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) has an area equal to the sum of the areas of the squares that can be constructed on its other two sides. Given this, if you make a triangularly shaped flat piece of clay with a right angle for one of its angles, it will have that property -- and it will never lose that property for as long as it retains its shape (continues to "have" the relevant form). Or go back to that ball of clay we were talking about before. It has the property that every point on its surface is at least roughly the same distance from its center (just how close this is to be precisely true will be a function of just how close the lump of clay is to being perfectly round, and an analogous point can be made about that triangle made of clay). Furthermore, it'll retain that property for as long as it retains its shape -- i.e., for as long as it remains a ball. But destroy that identity, and the property goes right along with it.
For example, make the ball into a former ball, an ex-ball, a ball-that-is-now-history, the mere remains of a ball (think here of the famous Monty Python routine about the dead parrot) -- maybe by making it into a cube! -- and it will no longer have the property in question.
Let's call properties like these properties (properties a thing will have for as long as it exists as a thing of a particular kind) "essential properties." And let's call properties things can lose without ceasing to be things of the kind they are "accidental properties" (an example of which would be having a nice full head of hair in people; it really is possible, as I'm sure you would admit, for people to go objectively bald without ceasing to be people in the process). This is what these two kinds of properties eventually came to be called, and our uses to this day of the words "accidental" and "essential" are rooted in this distinction. Plato is alredy aware of the distinction [see the final argument the soul's immortality in the Phaedo for an example of his use of it], but the terminology -- essential vs. accidental properties -- is one he never uses.
OK. With this nomenclature in place, we can ask now the following question: is it possible that beauty is an essential property of people, if not of their bodies, then at least of their souls? Some might find this an attractive idea. It this could be shown to be true, then we could count on its being the case that a soul that isn't beautiful -- an ugly soul -- is every bit as much a contradictio in adjecto (a contradiction in terms) as a square ball, or a round square, or hot snow, or a thing that's simultaneously sharp and dull (which, in Greek, is a thing that is "oxumoros" -- "sharp-dull" -- i.e., an oxymoron).
I myself doubt that such a thing could be proven, but if it could be proven -- then you'd have a knock-down argument for your claim that persons -- understood as souls and not as bodies -- cannot entirely lose their beauty for as long as they exist as persons. And you know what? This is precisely the strategy Plato's Sokrates envisions for establishing genuine sciences -- genuine bodies of knowledge. What they would consist in is propositions concerning the essential properties of things that have been demonstrated on the basis of fully satisfactory answers to those "What is it?" questions of his, those questions of his about the fundamental natures of things. See the end of the discussion of the divided line in Book VI of the Republic.
So for your present purposes, Ms. Adler, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to try to work out the answer to the question whether anything is essentially beautiful other than the beautiful itself. Are people -- their souls at any rate, if not their bodies -- essentially beautiful? It seems to me that you probably think they are. Could you prove it? Maybe you could, if you could say precisely what it is to be a person. If you could do that, then maybe you could do the sort of thing Euclid did in his geometry when on the basis of careful definitions of such things as lines, angles, right angles, triangles, squares, the areas of squares, and so on, he demonstrated by means of an argument from first principles the theorem traditionally ascribed to Puthagoras: that for right-angled triangles quite generally, the square on the hypotenuse is always equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. But what a strange idea. A geometry of personhood? A science in which all the essential properties of human beings might be demonstrated by proving a series of theorems? Is the idea of such a science ridiculous? Maybe it is. Hannah, for example, will tell us that it is. But its inspiration is plainly Platonic.
You might think that the idea of doing such a thing is ridiculously optimistic, but then think about this, that there was a time when it must have seemed ridiculously optimistic to develop the study of geometry into a rigorous science of the sort that Euclid managed to set forth in his Elements. Is the dream of doing this sort of thing dead? Or is it a dream that can still be dreamed?
This is a very hard challenge and I don't know if I will ever be able to find a correct answer to it. But I try to think of myself as an eternal optimist thinking things like people's souls are always beautiful, and heaven exists, and every failure is an oppertunity, and true love will find each and every one of us if we truly want it. So I'll give it a shot. Here's what I have so far...
People are good and bad. They are pushy, relentless, needy, honest, dishonest, some are driven by many choices, driven by money, books, education, by sex, by nature, by love, by choices that might not ever have been thought to be affecting them. (Like parents who were abusive or who did drugs, every choice people's parents made raising them affected people's lives and how people view things.) People are lazy and brilliant -- sometimes both ( since it takes great brillance to be able to slack off or manipulate the world so that it seems to be in your favor.) People are shy and withdrawn, creative and outgoing, competetive, sweet, funny, sarcastic, willing to be led and leaders, philosophers, scientists, politicians, poets, and just about anything else you can find in the dictionary.... Even the clay cube will always have its inner sphere; it could still be viewed as a cube, yes, but trim those corners off and the original shape is still there. The cube visible to the eye is like a person's outter beauty, no matter the shape the clay takes it will always be a sphere. And so this is just like the inner beauty of the soul: its eternal untarnished beauty will always be beautiful no matter what shape the outer beauty takes. I do think the soul is more than just occasionally taking the form of beauty i feel like the soul of each person is the form of beauty itself. The soul is what animates us; we are alive because we have a soul, and from what I can manage of the Phaedo Sokrates belives that the soul continues to live on even after death -- the soul is immortal. All instances that we can see in this world of justice and beauty are flawed and imperfect because no one has yet been able to reach the point where they see the soul and the different forms. Each person is unique and so beauty is varied to each but even if some one thinks that the person's inner beauty -- the form -- is ugly, there is always someone who will think it's fantastic. Hitler, the KKK -- even those people have and will always have someone who thinks their soul is fantastic while everyone else believes that their soul is terrible.
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Sarah Schwolert
Apprentice
32 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 11:54:24 AM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
Kerrie, I read the article you posted your quote from, it was very interesting. Thank you for your post, it helped me clarify some questions that I, too, have been having.
As far as the phrase kinei hos ermenos, I have been trying to look it up. All I have is that eromenos means “a boy whose beard had not yet begun to grow, the eromenos.” I found that definition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at this link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality/ . As far as the rest of the phrase is concerned, I could not find it anywhere. Obviously, it is not one of Aristotle’s better-known sayings.
Just from that one word you can decipher that it has something to do with the young boy, and so, from the context of the paragraph, maybe it has to do with love of a young boy, or the beauty of a young boy.
Sorry I couldn’t find more, but I hope that helps at least a little!
[Very lightly edited to enhance readability -TT] |
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Braulio Rivera
Apprentice
25 Posts |
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Braulio Rivera
Apprentice
25 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 2:30:19 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Jessica Yost
quote:
Originally posted by Emily Holland
I agree, in relationships you have to have both physical and mental stimulation in order for the relationship to work. If a relationship is all about the physical side, it will not work. You have to mentally be involved too. The same is true of mental stimulation, I feel that without showing physical connection, it will be really hard to share the way you feel about the person.
I agree with what you agree with. Do you think if a couple only has a physical relationship, it could still work? I know a couple who are like this and it has completely thrown me off the whole relationship thing. They have been dating about a year and they don't talk to each other. Neither one of them knows how the other feels; they don't know any deep, dark secrets, and they don't hang out and just have a good time. It's all about the physical connection. I am just confused because it works for them.
I am like you Emily, I need both physical and mental. If I don't have both, there is no way I could connect with someone and have a true relationship.
I think a lot has to do with what we consider a relationship to be. Many people are completely oblivious of many things that go on around them their whole lives long and it seems to work for them. Just think of all the people who live their entire lives by the book and seem never to have lived a day.
I believe that there are bare minimums people must meet to survive another day. But on the other hand there are other levels people must strive for to live more than others. I believe this ties into the whole concept of virtue. Without virtue you are jut another grain of sand in the sea, but with virtue you have a life that rises above mere physical existence.
Some people just strive for physical stimulation and that seems to work for them. But others like yourself wish to attain something that I'd say only 5% of all people achieve, and that is fulfillment at a very deep, spiritual level.
[Lightly edited to enhance readability -TT]
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 3:00:06 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
quote:
Originally posted by Kolby Davis
You believe that the teachings of Diotima suggest that everyone is born with a natural horniness, but they must be taught by somebody who understands horniness to basically be horny for beautiful things.
Well, first, I'd just say that Diotima presupposes -- what isn't all that implausible -- that all human being are born horny. Think of the Freudian conception of the place of sexual desire in the economy of the human personality. (Freud, by the way, owes enormous debts to Plato for much of his psychology. There are definitely differences, but there are enormous similarities too.*) To begin with, we're drawn to whatever we're drawn to, but we're sexual beings from birth. So eros is there in us from the beginning.
Now what eros really is (Diotima would say), is the desire for the good and, and the same time, the desire for begetting and birth in the beautiful (because this is how one gets the good, by begetting it and giving birth to it in the beautiful).
But what looks beautiful to us in the beginning isn't something in which we can beget and give birth to anything that's all that good. That's not to say that we can't beget and give birth in it, but however delighted we are with the result, it's not as good as we think it is. In the beginning, what we're drawn to really looks great and what comes of our union with it makes us enormously glad, and so we dive into what seems attractive to us and bring forth, from our union with it...well, whatever we bring forth.
Now if we're left to our own devices (to function as our own teachers, as you put it later in your post), we'll flounder around, and most likely we'll never come to know about any higher sort of beauty or about any sort of activity by means of which we could produce anything better than what we can produce as complete beginners devoid of real expertise and wisdom in these matters. So what we really need is a teacher, and that teacher, to be good teacher, needs to know three things: (1) he or she has to know what really is good** (in other words, he or she needs to have gotten to the end of the philosophical education described in the Republic and must have beheld the good itself -- the form of the good); (2) he or she needs to know what what really is beautiful** (in other words, he or she must also have beheld the beautiful itself -- the form of the beautiful); and he or she must be an adept in erotics (in other words, he or she must be a past master in the art of manipulating human desire).
A teacher who knows these things won't know how to teach us to be horny for beautiful things -- that comes perfectly naturally! -- but will rather know how to be horny for ever more genuinely beautiful things in this precise sense: he or she will gradually transform our horniness, our eros, into a desire for higher and higher things, things that are more and more beautiful, more and more genuinely beautiful things. He or she will capitalize on our original desires in such a way as to show us how undesirable what we originally desired is by comparison with things that more desirable still (by putting us to shame, of course, for pursuing things that aren't as beautiful as the most beautiful things we know***), and, by doing this again and again, will eventually make us into people who can see what is truly desirable, thereby completing our education.
quote:
Now I understand this connection with Diotima because of the cave passage and how one must be shown the way to enlightenment, not given it. So in the case of horniness, the enlightenment is the knowledge of erotics? One cannot know these erotics without being enlightened by them?
Hmm. Are you thinking I'm using the word "erotics" here to refer to people -- people who are lovers? I'm not. I'm using it to refer to a body of knowledge. It's not a word in standard use these days in this particular sense, so if I've confused you, it really isn't all that surprising. But think of my use of the word "erotics" as exactly like the familiar use of such words as "mathematics," "statistics," "physics," and "ethics," Each of these words is, despite that "s" at the end of each, a singular noun used to refer to a body of knowledge. Just as mathematics is the science of the mathematical, just as statistics is the science of the statistical, just as physics is the science of the physical, and just as ethics is the science of the ethical, so erotics is the science of the erotic[al] -- that which has to do with eros. That we don't have these words ("erotics" and "erotical") readily at our disposal in English just goes to show you how little influence this particular strand of Plato's thought has had on our way of understanding things. (By the way, sometimes, the "s" is left off when we use such words, deriving from Greek, for bodies of knowledge. We speak, for example, of "logic" and not "logics," but this is just a fluke of history. We also say "arithmetic" instead of "arithmetics." But logic is still the science of the logical and arithmetic is still the science of the arithmetical.)
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*The biggest difference between Plato and Freud is that whereas Freud thinks of all higher pursuits (the pursuit of beauty in the arts, for example, or the pursuit of truth in the sciences) as really just sublimated forms of sexual desire, Plato thinks of all baser desires (the desire to copulate with someone, for example), as really just undiscriminating and unknowedgeable forms of the desire for the good. Freud has adopted Diotima's theory, rejected talk about the soul, rejected the theory of forms, reconceptualized human beings as mere biological organisms, and turned Platonism on its head. For him, though, just as for Sokrates, the way to psychological health (= justice!) is conversation with a therapist, someone who can administer the "talking cure" via a kind of conversation in which we come to see the truth about ourselves and our desires. (The term "psychotherapy" is itself straight our of Plato. Remember Sokrates' remarks in the Apology about the supreme importance of one's caring for our soul (e.g., at 29e, 436)? The word for soul there (and everywhere in Plato) is "psukhe," the source of our word "psyche," and though the word for "caring" in that particular passage isn't the source of our word "therapy," a word Plato often uses (e.g., in the Euthyphro at 12e) for such caring or taking care of -- the word "therapeia" -- is the source of that word.)
**Sorry, Hannah, and everyone else who thinks there isn't any such thing as what really is good or what really is beautiful -- we're talking here about the views of Diotima, and she disagrees with you about this. She thinks there's a truth of the matter about the beautiful and the good.
***Remember that on Diotima's theory, what looks beautiful to us is always what seems full of the promise of the good. So the way the elenkhos will work is by putting us to shame regarding the things we regard as good. As our thinking about what is good is transformed, things that previously looked beautiful no longer will, and other things that seemed meaningless or ridiculous to us before, will begin to look beautiful. We will then want to have to do with them -- to "be with" them -- and to beget and give birth to something truly good in them. |
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Braulio Rivera
Apprentice
25 Posts |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Aug 06 2007 : 3:36:24 PM
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(THIS POST NOT PART OF THE CONVERSATION WITH PLATO AND SOKRATES)
Kolby, I'll pass your message on to Sokrates. He and Plato said they were getting tired of just standing around and went downtown, where they've been pestering the mayor and the members of the city council for the last several days. I'll see if I can get him to come back. |
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Braulio Rivera
Apprentice
25 Posts |
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Week 11: The Education of Desire
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