A Blog on McConnell Center Life

Recently, we had the pleasure (that Dr. Gregg might call perverse) of discussing the literature and philosophy of Ayn Rand. So often Rand is attacked for her "godlessness", her "dogmatic atheism". Her motivations in this instance are not to attack the believers of God, but instead to build up the believers of men. That faith that so many put into God, she directs toward man. She rejects religion, not merely because of the obvious irrationality of it, but also, as her journals indicate, the bloody and bigoted history of religion. By definition faith is a denial of reason. As the great influence of her youth put it: "Faith: not wanting to know what is true." (Friedrich Nietzsche). Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. Those who peddle faith as absolute truth are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. The pages of history are stained by the bloo...

The Symposium demonstrates the utter ineffability of love. Is it a hole to be filled; is it a soul's companion in another; can it be with one or many? The task of defining love is the fiercest hydra in the realm of philosophy, for when one question even appears answered three more spring forth. The speakers tackle the issue from their paradigm of strength, whether it be Pausanias's legal bent, the historian's perspective that Phaedrus offers, or Socrates's questioning of Agathon. From this, we ask ourselves: Is love just 'to each his own'? Is it not universal in value as opposed to universal in form? For my part, I tend to side with Aristophanes. Love, whatever form it may come in, makes us whole in a way that exceeds human understanding. We become gods when empowered by love. Love is limited by no bounds. Love is, as Aristophanes proposes, essential to our happiness. ---- As far as Socrates's bridge goes, I believe I shall quote the Bible (yes, I think it m...

Plato’s Symposium pushes the reader to reevaluate those attributes of life which most people hold in high esteem. Plato used a competition to eulogize Love as a device to demonstrate the pervasiveness of positive assumptions within human thought. The men who attended the celebratory banquet described in Plato’s work portrayed Love as the balance of natural elements, the pursuit of knowledge, an unquestioning service, a comedic mythology, and other examples which imposed all beauty and good upon this active force. These views portrayed the common idolization of Love. Plato contradicts these positive theories of Love through the wise voice and reasoning of Socrates. Socrates expounded his belief that a competition of eulogies failed to derive the true nature of Love. Through Socrates, Plato stated: “And I understood then that I was a fool when I told you I would take my turn in singing the honours of Love, and admitted I was terribly clever in love affairs, whereas it seems I really had...

The snows conspired to keep a group of us getting together on Monday, February 15th to discussion Plato’s Symposium. So, I thought I would put some questions up here on the blog so that it might jog some thought among the students who had read and prepared for that discussion last week. I hope some of them will use this opportunity to think allowed and help us further this discussion which has been going on for, oh, a few thousand years. . . • How does reading The Symposium better help you understand love and prepare for life? • It is true, isn’t it, that we tend to forgive lover’s an awful lot? We forgive them more than others, don’t we? “Oh, he is in love . . .” • Does love drive us toward beauty and away from ugliness? Is it a powerful motivator to right action? Does not wanting to be seen unvirtuous in front of a lover, cause us to act better than we would otherwise? What does this all tell us about being careful of the character of the people we love? • What do you make abo...

Perhaps what strikes me the most about the Symposium is the parallel between the different views on love centuries ago and the differing views on love within my own generation. We have tree huggers that love the grass as much as their brother--defining love as a wholesome acceptance of all things surrounding them. We have those that see love as only feeling compassion toward those that love you in return--an earned love. And of course many more ideas to all moderations and extremes. My favorite theory on love was Aristophanes' myth on how we were once twice the people we are now, but because we were a threat to the gods, Zeus cut us in half. We go around seeking to find this other half to complete ourselves. Interestingly, this idea is opposite of the Biblical view that man was created lonely, and that God realized his need for a helper and thus created women. What parallels between these two stories, though, is the idea that we are incomplete without love--another angle with wh...