a little about symposium

One question raised on class yesterday is quite interesting, that is, how to relate our ordinary life with those erotic practices in ancient Greece? Normally we don’t die for the loved as what is described in the Greek mythologies. Nor we really believe that women and men were originally combined together and then separated by Zeus. Even it is hard for me to believe in ordinary sense that we engage into love relationship is to be immortal. If people fall in love and become obsessed with each other so that they are willing to die for the other any time anywhere, they are normally viewed as crazy, insane.

Most of time I doubt the possibility of being both standing at the top of the mountain and understanding the ideas of ordinary people. Philosophers, like those who are in deepest love relationships, are beyond understanding. Only those who are in the same position with them can understand each other. But that may be too pessimistic. Actually philosophy does help we ordinary people understand some transcendental domain in the world. The truth and value of such domain is not as real as what we can normally experience in daily life, but conversely, much more real than our daily life. The analogy of watching movie or telling story might be helpful for us to understand that. We all know movies are “not true”, for they are stories and scenes created by people who desires to gain our sympathy, or money. However we watch movie in a way sometimes more seriously than we treat our daily life. I believe it is because we can see something more fundamental in pictures and colors and fictional dialogues in the movie. Maybe that is the meaning of art, which sometimes is remote from our life and seems illusory but always makes feel something ineffable. Therefore it seems to me that we should figure out some way to see the limitation of our ordinary life. We would have to appeal to story, movie, fiction, sacrificial relationship etc, to better understand the meaning of life. We might never have the chance to die for people we love, nor to successfully contemplate the form of that beauty itself, but at least we know there are people and philosophical activities promoting human knowledge of that.