Todd W. Reeser - Setting Plato Straight

This use of the term is not a recent invention. The OEDs list of examples for platonic as not sexual begins with a series of seventeenth-century examples, the first occurring in Ben Jonsons 1631 play The New Inn. William Davenants 1636 English play The Platonic Lovers is about two sets of male-female couples, one platonic and the other not platonic.

But if there is a generally accepted meaning in these various time periods, it is a historically inaccurate one. In Plato, loveor more precisely, erosincorporates the senses and is not necessarily asexual. If fidelity to Plato were the goal, the phrase Socratic love would be better suited to describe the relation since Socrates appears as chaste in Plato. That Voltaire in the eighteenth century uses the phrase Socratic love to refer to pederasty suggests that platonic love was already defined as an asexual relation between men and women. While the Platonic dialogues absolutely allow for the possibility of intimate, affectionate, and spiritual love, what we and early moderns call platonic love would likely seem somewhat strange to Plato. The scene from the story Platonic Friendship might have confused Plato, too, had he read it. Although Plato never used the phrase, the sense of platonic love for him would undoubtedly evoke the image of a man with a younger male. While male-female love is not always excluded in Plato, male-male eros was clearly the highest form of love and platonic love would certainly not be imagined by Plato as between two people of different sexes. Were the philosopher to read craigslist, he might take strictly platonic as a category requiring a man and a boy of a fixed age and as discounting love between a man and a woman or between two grown men.

Mrs. Judsons notion of platonic, then, does not correspond to Plato on two counts: the sex of the two people involved and the possibility of sexual activity between them. How did this shift happen? How did Platonic eros turn into platonic love? How did it become heterosexual and purified of sex? This process of setting Plato straight is the subject of this book, which recounts the story of how and why these changes happened. Not a rapid or sudden shift, it takes place in the Renaissance over the course of approximately a century and a half, particularly in Italy and France. While the fifteenth-century Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino is credited with coining the Latin phrase platonic love [amor platonicus], he does not single-handedly transform Plato, but rather he is a partalbeit an important partof a much larger cultural transformation. By virtue of transforming Platonic same-sex sexuality, the Renaissance creates a type of heterosexuality, even if the term or concept is not yet articulated as such. This book is composed of a series of studies of important Western European texts in which this transformation occurs. While I do not treat the English context (that would require a second book), the texts studied here strongly influence what happens across the Channel as the English are reading many of these texts. I am told by native speakers of many languages (e.g., Arabic, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish) that a version of platonic love in the modern sense exists in their languages, suggesting that this usage, whose origins I locate in the Renaissance, has become widespread around the globe and that the influence of the texts I study extends well beyond their specific cultural contexts.

Despite this transformation of eros, some thinkers display an awareness of the anachronism of platonic love. In the play The Platonic Lovers, the physician-philosopher Buonateste remarks about Plato to Lord Sciolto: I still beseech you not to wrong / My good old friend Plato, with this court calumnie; / They father on him a Fantastick Love / Hee never knew, poore Gentleman. He is responding to the Lord who noted that his son is very much Platonically given (139). Soon after, another character asks the philosopher Did not Plato write of Love? to which the philosopher responds: Divinely sir, but not such kind of Love / As Ladies would have now; they mistake him (140). Part of the issue in the play is Scioltos son, who mistakes [Plato] too since he understands no Greeke (140). The Lord thus plans to givet him straight (140). The philosophers comic remarks suggest an awareness that the English of the time are seeing Platonic eros as straight instead of getting him straight, thus that the cultural process of setting Plato straight is in no way an even or linear process without hiccups. One of the key arguments of this book is that the Renaissance does not fully set Plato straight, and that the numerous and various attempts to do so never fully take hold. In this way, Setting Plato Straight is meant as a contribution to a twenty-first-century sexual counterdiscourse that reveals how our assumptions about so-called platonic love cover up a series of normative sexual slippages and mutations.