Recently Texas A&M university has been in the news for (ostensibly) kicking Plato out of the academy, or at least a philosophy classroom. Prof. Martin Petersen was told by university officials that his upcoming philosophy course titled “Contemporary Moral Problems” fell foul of the university’s newly invented principle that course content not include, among other things, “gender ideology,” defined as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.” In order to correct this problem each university of the A&M system would feed its syllabi and course details into a database which would be examined by AI searching for misaligned content. The offending elements of Prof. Petersen’s syllabus were two snippets of Plato’s Symposium: Aristophanes’ speech about the original four-legged, four-armed, two-faced humans, which famously had three biological sexes—male, female and androgyne—each with appropriate sex organs, and Diotima’s speech known as the ladder of love.
The concatenation of elements, events, and descriptions here is at least as slapstick and comical as Symposium itself, and like Symposium itself can be the source of some mind quickening, as well as the usual wind-egg quickening Socrates was famous for delivering people of (see Theaetetus). We should all be able to agree that the context in which a word like “wind-egg” or “gay” or nearly any other appears will make a considerable difference in its import. The same principle holds true of snippets of speech (or even of film!). Given this fact one should have considerable question about Plato’s so-called appearance in what has been a most popular course for over fifty years: “Contemporary Moral Problems.”
Such courses are almost always and everywhere offered with no pre-requisites, in other words without any context. Most philosophy teachers (and many textbooks) attempt to supply some context by running through various ethical theories—Rule and Act Utilitarianism, Deontology, Natural Law, Relativist, Virtue Ethics, with maybe a swipe at Divine Law—in the first week (i.e., two or three days) of class before starting on the matter of the course. This is offering just enough small arms training to make the student dangerous to himself and others without engendering even the beginning of serious examination or responsibility (both of which would seem to be of import in a philosophy course and particularly one in ethics).
But the course is popular, and the measure of success employed by the administration is based on the equation meat/seats=X. The higher the ratio (X) of butts needing seats to available seats is the measure of worth of the course. This is the administrative algorithm simply because it is the only algorithm which can be applied without quibble or qualification across all disciplines and classrooms. Whether it measures anything worthwhile or meaningful (or what the meaning might be) are questions it is absolutely unnecessary to answer and could only cause problems should one try. The ethical principle involved in decision making here (suitable across all “professional ethics” problems) is: Don’t make things difficult for administrators.
Within the problematic course itself, and the charge against it—that it excises Plato from his own creation, the academy—there are two issues to make clear. The first is that it is Prof. Petersen himself who excised Plato, precisely by presenting excerpts from the dialogue in order to fit them into the “content” Prof. Petersen wished to present. Whatever else the administrative AI is up to, it is assuredly not kicking Plato out, since he isn’t there to be kicked. Further, the two passages which the administrative AI consider offending against the rule are given the context of “contemporary issues in sexual ethics” which might really be a topic within philosophy, but is most probably not the topic of Symposium.
Secondly, presenting the snippets out of their context this way disables precisely the effect it seems Platonic dialogue requires us to engage in: wondering whether the speaker is serious about the story he tells and what that seriousness might aim at, or whether he is telling it for some other effect than the transference of particular knowledge or opinion. Consider the first snippet:
The speaker, Aristophanes, is probably the most famous comic poet, actor, and producer in human history to say nothing of ancient Athens. Such geniuses might easily have humor and seriousness mixed with such wit that the centuries cannot outwit them; to treat such a person’s story as offering a position in “contemporary moral problems” is not even artificially intelligent. Like Plato himself, this character set up imagery which has been alive ever since. His particular story, of the divided human, has “contemporary” recollection in both serious and comic contexts.1 “In the beginning…” or “once upon a time…” there were three sexes, two of which continue to exist among the two-handed, two-legged one-faced humans who now exist, and the third (androgyne) is now only a name, “and that an insult” (Symp 189e). We should note that there were several members of the drinking party who were labelled thus. For those with an interest in sexual ethics we should recall that the three sorts of original round humans sowed their seed in the ground: onanism was reproductive. After our division by Zeus, we might consider that the pieces from the original full man and full woman are still attempting to act in accord with their original nature, while those pieces of the original androgyne reproduce by enacting a well-known curse. Aristophanes was not perfectly clear on this matter.
We should consider further the audience in the dialogue. Every speaker up until Aristophanes is one part of a pederastic pair, whose partner is at the party as well. The love they have been speaking of is peculiar to them. So, one needs to consider whether Aristophanes’ story is praising that love or mocking it so ironically that they end up hoist with their own petard. They all, in any case, cheer for his story. A similar question ought to be raised about them after Diotima’s speech—as it is in Symposium anyway: Where on her ladder of love have the previous speakers revealed themselves to be? Given that, what evaluation should we give to their thoughts about love or even, if I may use the words in today’s academy, sexual congress? Including Aristophanes’s.
For those unfamiliar with the dialogue, Diotima, the only female voice in this discussion of love and whom Socrates invents as his teacher regarding all things related to eros, had told him that while a human’s first love is a body, humans will soon see beauty in many bodies and so their love will become more catholic; then they may see in a beloved a beauty of soul much better and more lasting than that of the body, but there are many such souls one should love, and then they may see the beauty of ideas, finally being led to the beautiful itself in which all these preliminaries have participated in their partial way. Each stage imagines its own quite different fulfilling intercourse. The great books are always on time, but whether they are concerned with “contemporary moral problems” or “sexual ethics” or something much more important to which such classroom constraints are an unoriginal misprision seems a quite legitimate question.
In response to these facts and events, I draw the following conclusions: The course itself is an academic foolishness. No mathematician (Plato among them) would allow you to take a course on “Problems in Solid Geometry” without having first taken at least one course in Geometry. (See his “On the Order of Preparation for Dialectic” in Republic). The only reason things are allowed to be different in present day university philosophy is because Philosophy really doesn’t matter. This presumption is shared by the professors who teach such courses and the administration which awards such courses because they do well according to their algorithm. A plague on both these houses.
Plato has not been kicked out of the academy in the university’s censoring this particular course. He has not been allowed in in the first place. The correct solution to the pedagogical problem Prof. Petersen faces is to read all of Symposium. This might lead one to consider whether the “contemporary” idea that there is such a thing as “sexual ethics,” much less, one that can be divided off from other moral and philosophical issues that seem less directly moral, sexual, or contemporary is another academic stupidity. Or not.
It will probably turn out that, after scanning the whole dialogue, the AI kicks out particularly Aristophanes’s speech as well as Diotima’s from the new course requiring the reading of Symposium. The pederasts will remain standing. Then we have the real thing: Plato expelled from the academy. Any worthwhile artificial intelligence will do just that, since Aristophanes’s story is clearly out of touch with the biological—and anthropological! —facts of human nature. His explanation of the “missing link” between prehistoric human types and present-day matters of psycho-social issues has not a shred of evidence from either science. How could it possibly be anything but “fake news” or ideological humbug?
Gene Fendt is Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy (emeritus), University of Nebraska, Kearney; fendtg@unk.edu. Fendt last appeared in AQ with “Piety, Impiety, and the Business of the University,” in the summer of 2024.
1 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, chapter 4 at footnote 5, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch at “The Origin of Love.”
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