text:
There is a hunger for fresh thinking and an optimistic, balanced viewpoint that does not vilify men and boys. #MeToo and the "Believe the Woman" domestic violence campaigns are just the tip of an iceberg, we need to beware the word "victim", it is undergoing a change of meaning and we must ask what someone means by "victim".
Areas of concern for men and boys include family courts, education, homelessness, suicide, the criminal justice system, rules of dating, false accusations, lack of reproductive rights, lack of positive role models in the media and entertainment, lack of male teachers, wrongful exclusion of fathers from their children, no after schools clubs for boys such as Boy Scouts when there is for girls with the Girl Guides and many other matters large and small.
Why is there no balance in these new laws? It seems that issues were promoted and pushed for by people with no concern or even an antipathy towards men and boys. Any cautionary voices seem to have either been ignored or vilified as being against women and girls, with those holding power either directly pursuing this goal, being naive, manipulated, bought or blackmailed. When you look back at the vast ocean of legislation it is all pushing in one direction, whatever you call this advance of female privilege it was surely was never meant to be fair. We desperately need a counterbalancing voice or movement.
Basic rights that were once taken for granted in our society have been thrown away in order to appease fanatical gender partisans. Free speech, innocent until proven guilty, the right of a legal defence team to see all the evidence, allowing evidence that would clear some one to be given in court, even jury trials are under threat now in rape cases. This is because these fanatical partisans want more prosecutions and convictions, they even set targets but having targets in justice is injustice, the circumstances of the each case are paramount. New rape laws make normal sexual relationships rape, if a women says so at any time in the future. Men in relationships who call to report being attacked by their female partners face suspicion but women are believed.
These matters are serious and there is no end in sight to the demands being made, were this to carry on indefinitely it would be it a truly scary future. However the projected course can be changed, despite the fanatical partisans being well entrenched in positions of power and even if most people have come to hold similar views due to the biased reporting they hear, people still really want a society that is to fair to all, they just need to be able to see what is actually going on behind the scenes and hear the truth.
I will not repeat all that has been said on these subjects over the years but simply put an opening paragraph or two and then refer to the recommended books, to certain links and to the "More Online" page. My concern is that things are getting worse rather than better so I am concentrating on what can be done. Please then return here to see the "Improve Society" page because we all need to get involved in politics in our daily lives at every opportunity we have, with family, friends and the world at large and then I hope change will begin to happen. We may not be interested in politics but politics is interested is us and will affect us whether we like it or not.
A watchdog for gender-balanced legislation - https://equi-law.uk/
http://empathygap.uk/
Introduction to the Disadvantages faced by Men and Boys - http://empathygap.uk/?page_id=22
The empathy gap is what has led to the areas of concern for men and boys in the sections below and is the reason it will be difficult to put right. There is a lack of empathy shown to men, this is true historically, now and no doubt in the future unless we constantly try to be fair to all and remain aware of our natural and unfair evolutionary bias. Survival of the species depended on the wellbeing of children, women have adapted this as a route to their own wellbeing and privilage, far beyond what is necessary for children's well being and even against it.
For a much fuller account please visit http://empathygap.uk/?p=2756
The wonderful book "The Empathy Gap" by William Collins provides all the evidence you could possibly need with detailed statistics, clarity and insight. It can not be recommended enough.
Video by Prim Reaper - Allowing men to express their justified anger - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KWkEcKg1pY
This is such a massive subject and the legal changes of the last forty years have led to a whole new movement - 'MGTOW' - Men Going Their Own Way, but it does not to be like this with the right laws. It the meantime for many men this seems like the best option.
It is too big a subject to cover here so please look at the links below and the book 'Making Love Great Again' Thank you.
Articles online, as you will see many subjects are linked together in men's experience:
Men and committment - https://medium.com/gender-studies-for-men/why-are-men-afraid-of-commitment-af3becfb08a5
Divorce and Domestic Violence - https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/divorce-and-the-silver-bullet/
Divorce and Suicide - https://www.foxnews.com/story/are-fathers-rights-a-factor-in-male-suicide
Joint Custody Law tried in Kentucky with great results- https://eu.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/kentuckys-joint-custody-law-leads-decline-family-court-cases/2158216001/
Making Love Great Again - DeAnna Lorraine
Domestic Violence some statistics - http://empathygap.uk/?p=2952
Artlicles online:
Philip Davies on the Domestic Violence bill in the House of Commons - https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-10-02a.1291.1
Domestic Violence Against Men is No Laughing Matter - https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/talking-about-men/201911/domestic-violence-against-men-no-laughing-matter
Australia, Divorce and Domestic Violence - http://newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=56865
Australia, Divorce and Domestic Violence (more detailed) - https://www.bettinaarndt.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Dr-Augusto-Zimmermann-BetterFamilyLawSystem2017-Submission093.pdf
A Domestic Violence Councellor speaks out "fathers and kids are often the biggest losers" - https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/10/a-counsellor-writes-to-the-family-court-inquiry/
First some statistics:
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (US Dept. Of Health/Census) – 5 times the average.
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average.
85% of all children who show behaviour disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Centre for Disease Control)
80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes –14 times the average. (Justice & Behaviour, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
93% of the US prison population is male but 90% of these are from fatherless households.
You would think that in light of the statistics above that family courts would do everything in their power to enable children (especially boys) to live with their fathers on at least a 50% basis in a shared parenting arrangement as long as the father is willing and not proven to be a danger but the reality is very different in every aspect of law from the moment of conception to relationship breakdown and beyond. Is this what happens? No, children's interests are sacrificed to women's interest,
Governments reward single parent households by paying mothers benefits directly to them from tax payers, predominantly men. Domestic violence claims are allowed to go unchecked to exclude fathers. Sperm banks are allowed and these exclude fathers. Fathers have to pay to support children they are not allowed to see, even if they have the right in law they do not have it in practise because mothers flout the law with impunity.
There is a great article in the link below about how humans benefit compared with other apes due to having involved fathers.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-devotion-of-the-human-dad-separates-us-from-other-apes
and another on the fatherless generation https://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/
During evolution men have learned to protect and favour women as a means of protecting and favouring their own children, women and men benefited from the arrangement in passing on their genes. Women then stole the right to speak for the children to further their own interests, putting themselves above the children. Women as a group wanted the power to use as they see fit, they wanted men to be powerless. Women claimed the moral highground and have been shaming men ever since, dividing men and setting them against one another.
Parental alienation is not just something parents do to their children, although that is a huge concern, the family court system is the biggest offender and the harm they actively and passively do to children is immeasurable.
Moving video, the western world, not just Australia needs this. Hanson brought to tears speaking about family law inquiry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlAg_LaZh9Q&feature=youtu.be
Video interview shedding light on family courts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpHzCNJxUvE.
Parential Alienation talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=v3YdldNXZnQ
New NGO to document family courts and parental alienation worldwide - https://www.byline.com/column/36/article/2522
https://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/mens_choice/
There is a detailed wide ranging analysis of circumcision in the book The Empathy Gap by William Collins and a very well researched and produced movie https://circumcisionmovie.com/
Short Trailer for the Movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bZCEn88kSo
Also check out - https://genitalautonomysociety.org/
The cruelty of circumcision - https://www.ethicanmag.com/post/the-cruelty-of-circumcision
The Central Union for Child Welfare, Finland, gave the following opinion in 2003
'Circumcision of boys that violates the personal integrity of the boys is not acceptable unless it is done for medical reasons to treat an illness. The basis for the measures of a society must be an unconditional respect for the bodily integrity of an under-aged person. Ciircumcision intervenes in the sexual integrity of a male child causing a permanent change in organs and has consequences pertaining to both health and quality of life. The circumcision of girls is rightly considered a inhuman mutilation of the genitals and is punished abuse. Also boys must be guaranteed a similar protection by law. Accordint to the opinion of the Central Union for Child Welfare in Finland nobody has the right, on behalf of the child, to concent to theoperation, violating the bodily integrity of the child, if it not done to treat an illness.' Taken from The Empathy Gap.
If you have not read "The War Against Boys" by Christina Hoff Summers I highly recommend it, it is astonishing how the education system in western society has been skewed towards girl's ways of learning and it is astonishing to me how some feminists (particularly in the USA) fight to keep it that way in view of the harm it does to boys involvement and learning.
In the UK some steps are being made to take into account the different ways that boys learn but there is a long way to go and for some people simply recognizing that there are different ways that boys and girls learn is provocative, even though it was recognition of this that lead to many changes away from old ways of learning, in the first place in order to help girls learn at school.
Just take a look at the important information below, from the website of the Men and Boys Coalition http://www.menandboyscoalition.org.uk/statistics which is well worth a look.
62,000 fewer boys/men go to university every year than girls/women
By the age of 16, girls are over 20% more likely to achieve five GCSEs including English and Maths at Grade C or better
In 2015, in England 52.5% of boys achieved 5 A*- C GCSEs including English and Maths in comparison to 61.8% of girls
In England 26.2% of teachers are male, 15.2% of primary school teachers are male as are 37.6% of secondary school teachers.
8.5% of teaching assistants and 18% of support staff are male. Overall, 19.9% of all school staff are male
Boys are around three times more likely to receive a permanent or fixed period exclusion than girls
Fewer men than women are becoming teachers, GP's, dentists, vets and lawyers every year. Female GP trainees outnumber their male counterparts by more than 2:1 across the UK and women are now in the majority for all age groups under 50 in the general practice workforce
In 2015/16, 28,000 fewer men/boys started apprenticeships than girls/women
The Department for Education does not fund any initiatives that just focus on addressing boys' underachievement
The section on education in The Emapthy Gap by William Collins is excellent and thorough, well worth reading
Another viewpoint, Are women destroying acedemia, probably: https://vdare.com/articles/are-women-destroying-academia-probably
"Enter Hungary. In an effort to restore curricular and administrative sanity to university education, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have passed legislation to abolish Gender Studies as an area of official study." - https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/hungary-takes-on-the-feminist-goliath-and-wins/
Bias in university appointments (This one from Sweden): http://academicrightswatch.com/?p=2915
Kangaroo Courts on University Campus - https://www.bettinaarndt.com.au/kangaroo-courts/
To summarize and to generalize, men try harder and we penalise them for it, whether it's composers and conductors or a 9-5 job / career.
Articles online:
Microsoft debate on Diversity - https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questioning-the-value-of-diversity/
Male Psychology - https://malepsychology.org.uk/sample-page/opportunities/jobs-around-male-psychology/
How many rape allegations are false?
Article: https://medium.com/t/@jimpreston_36730/how-many-rape-accusations-are-false-f52e4c675f2a
Rape, sexual assult, false allegation and celebrities - http://empathygap.uk/?p=2274
"Of the 45 celebrity cases listed above, 12 men were mostly likely guilty, 29 men were almost certainly innocent, and in 4 cases the matter is not clear.
Of the 25 politicians I reviewed in Part 3 I judge 4 were guilty and 21 not guilty.
Combining politicians and celebrities this suggests 50 innocent men out of 70 accused, a false allegation rate of a staggering 71%."
Article - Two drunk people having sex - students have to file sexual misconduct complaints to avoid becoming the accused. - https://reason.com/2018/05/11/cincinnati-rape-title-ix-doe-roe-sex/
Advise on how to reduce the chance of being falsely accused - https://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-a-sadly-necessary-handbook-for-men-falsely-accused-of-sexual-assault?fbclid=IwAR19V1hCA1lbK3QvjMjRQeGwMh31hPAxJ3EFmFSbDFkOgFB6xTXcI3R8BwE
False accusation reasons from The Myth of Male Power – Warren Farrell
Motivations given by the women who acknowledged they had made false accusations of rape.
Spite or revenge 20%
To compensate for feelings of guilt or shame 20%.
Thought she might be pregnant 15%
To conceal an affair 12%
To test husbands love 9%
Mental / emotional disorder 9%
To avoid personal responsibility 4%
Failure to pay or extortion 4%
Thought she might have caught VD 3%
Other 6%
Dr McDowell found that most fake accusations are 'instrumental' – they serve a purpose.
'To my considerable chagrin, we found that at least 60% of all rape allegations were false'. Dr Charles P Mcdowell, Supervisory Special Agent, US Air Force, Office of Special Investigations.
Recommended books: The Empathy Gap by William Collins and The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell
To quote from the book Red Pill Psychology by Peter Wright and Paul Elam.
"Years back, in another life, I presented at seminars and conferences that provided continuing education units for professional re-certification. In one particular module, I used a portable grease board in front of my waiting audience. Without introducing myself or saying anything else, I wrote the words "Men are..." at the top of the board and then silently invited the audience to finish the sentence.
Almost invaribly, "pigs" or "dogs" was the first offering, accompanied by a room full of good natured chuckles. I would nod my head and write it down on the board and return to the audience, still silent, for more.
"Controlling," says one. "Afraid of commitment," says another. Aggressive." "Macho" "Afraid of intimacy" "Sexist," and "Power hungry." More of the pejoratives, and almost only pejoratives, would come from the audience till the board was full.
I then flipped the board to the other side. "Women are..." was the cue, and the answers were even more rapid fire than they were with men. "Strong." "Capable" "Empowered" "Sensitive." "Nurturing," and the like would fly from the audience to the grease board like a barrage of arrows, till that side too was full.
"What do you imagine, " I would ask, taking a strategic pause for a sip of water, "that these answers tell us about the real nature of sexism in the way we view men and women?"
Asking them a question with actual spoken words must have thrown them for a loop, because the stock response to that question was almost invariably a room full of nonplussed, cognitively dissonant faces. And the confusion usually gave way to irritation, clearly at me, though every answer on both sides of that board had come from them. And by the way, the participants in the crowd? They weren't accountants or nurse or teachers or financial advisors.
They were mental health professionals.
They were counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and the like; the very people we love to imagine possess the objectivity to rise above the mindset of bigotry and sexism. And the people, despite our want of faith in their work, least likely to actually do it.
Online articles:
Psychologys war on men - https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/09/psychologys-war-on-men/
Over 84% of men who have committed suicide sought help within the year before they committed suicide. https://medium.com/t/@jimpreston_36730/myth-men-are-afraid-to-talk-about-depression-and-its-literally-killing-them-977e85f715ae
Birmingham Mail - 12th April 2019. "A judge told a banned drink-driver who smashed into three other vehicles that she would have been jailed if she were a man. Judge Sarah Buckingham said "alcoholic" Victoria Parry would have been "straight down the stairs" to prison had her sex been different."
The Gender Justice Gap is HUGE and highlights the human empathy gap, an evolutionary and social bi product of a basic survival instinct of out species. Men are more expendable then women when it comes down to human reproduction, certainly but is this how we are to judge the value of a human being in a modern society and particularly when the world is already over populated, if you believe it is over populated.
Practically speaking on a sinking ship we should favour women and female children with a lesser number of male children and men as protectors and future protectors but only favour women up to the menopause for then men of all ages should be favoured over older women because they can still father children. In other words older women should be the last to be saved. Is this the case? No it is not, so why is that? Could it be because men love women and girls as a group as well as individually but women love men and boys individually but not as a group, perhaps as a group women view men as a utility. Perhaps this comes from the fact that most children are predominantly raised by women, particularly in their early years.
For more reading try The Empathy Gap - http://empathygap.uk/
Perhaps the empathy gap is what is playing out, in the criminal justice system, you might like to look for further information on gender in the criminal justice system at the following:
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspx
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/women-arent-always-sentenced-by-the-book-maybe-men-shouldnt-be-either/
https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/sentencing-gap-men-likely-go-prison-mrzs/
https://www.socialtheorywatch.org/
Video - Corroboration Evidence not required Canada - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyP1rUwQRnU
The double standards still go on in this recent link, surely if can help stop women re-offending this way we can also do the same for men and fathers - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7152019/Justice-Secretary-David-Gauke-considering-plans-female-prisoners-mobile-phones.html
We have laws against undesirable human traits such as fraud, murder, theft, kidnap, blackmail, causing bodily harm etc. and have begun as a society working on discrimination, favouritism in job opportunities on the basis of race, sex, gender etc. now it time to move forward again and legislate to protect against gynocentrism, our inbuilt instinct to rush to assume female victimhood and male perpetrator status, or to assume that women should be helped and men should be able to cope, we need to move forward and to legally protect against this lack of empathy for men.
We should ask legislators, judges, jurors etc. to switch sex, gender and race in their minds before pronouncing judgements, deciding punishments and making decisions in general.
The elephant in the equality room, what is preventing equality? - Feminism
How can a word about one sex be about equality? It can't and it isn't.
The History of Feminism by Elizabeth Hobson, it's a long and informative read, so worth printing out and reading at your leisure - https://j4mb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2019/05/190524-transcript-of-Elizabeth-Hobsons-talk-at-Cambridge-Uni.pdf
https://www.poliquads.com/post/feminists-do-not-get-to-define-feminism
https://www.poliquads.com/post/meet-the-new-feminism-same-as-the-old-feminism
Ex-Feminist Interview - https://www.bitchute.com/video/upBP2UYyRZU/
Most of the unjust laws on the whole of this website are the direct result of the work on people holding feminist views getting themselves into positions of power and influence and have been brought about by deceiving the general population and other naive politicians with false, partial and distorted statistics predominantly fostered but not entirely by the left of politics.
Who can you vote for to help with men's and boy's issues and who to avoid?
OPINION - UK's anti-male Labour Party - http://blog.men.we.bs/uks-anti-male-labour-party_discrimination


When you have the nicknames "Pee Wee" and "The Meanest Man in America" then you must be one bad little dude. That was true for Donald Henry Gaskins, a notorious serial killer who prowled the highways of the American South looking for victims to torture and kill. Our "Donald Gaskins" shirt just might give anyone who sees it some bothersome feelings. Available in t-shirts, tank tops & sweatshirts in men's & women's sizes.


text:
Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception
Citation: Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, eds. 2007. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Hellenic Studies Series 22. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LesherJ_NailsD_SheffieldF_eds.Symposium_Interpretation_Reception.2007.
Diagrams and Illustrations
Part I. The Symposium and Plato's Philosophy1. The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue, Christopher Rowe
2. The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the Symposium: Plato's Endoxic Method? Frisbee C. C. Sheffield
3. A Platonic Reading of Plato's Symposium, Lloyd P. Gerson
Part II. Interpreting Plato's Symposium4. Medicine, Magic, and Religion in Plato's Symposium, Mark L. McPherran
5. Permanent Beauty and Becoming Happy in Plato's Symposium, Gabriel Richardson Lear
6. A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium, C. D. C. Reeve
7. Where is Socrates on the "Ladder of Love"? Ruby Blondell
8. Tragedy Off-Stage, Debra Nails
9. The Virtues of Platonic Love, Gabriela Roxana Carone
Part III. The Symposium, Sex, and Gender10. Agathon, Pausanias, and Diotima in Plato's Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia, Luc Brisson
11. Female Imagery in Plato, Angela Hobbs
12. Plato in the Courtroom: The Surprising Influence of the Symposium on Legal Theory, Jeffrey Carnes
Part IV. The Reception of Plato's Symposium13. Plato's Symposium and the Traditions of Ancient Fiction, Richard Hunter
14. Some Notable Afterimages of Plato's Symposium, J. H. Lesher
15. The Hangover of Plato's Symposium in the Italian Renaissance from Bruni (1435) to Castiglione (1528), Diskin Clay
16. Platonic Selves in Shelley and Stevens, David K. O'Connor
6. A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium
C. D. C. Reeve [1]
Agathon's drinking-party has reached its philosophical apogee in Socrates' vivid, Diotima-inspired description of the ultimate object of all love and desire, the Platonic form of beauty—the beautiful itself. All of a sudden, there is a commotion and loud knocking. Someone "very drunk and shouting loudly" is "asking, Where is Agathon? and saying, Take me to Agathon" (Symposium 212d5). [2] Alcibiades, the best-looking man in Athens, has arrived, "crowned with a bushy wreath of ivy and violets and a multitude of fillets on his head" (212e1–2). And what happens? The beautiful itself gets eclipsed by the beautiful body; the philosophical apogee trumped by the theatrical one. The speech Alcibiades subsequently gives is riveting, too, as dramatic as his entrance. It casts the other speeches into the shade. It is so vivid, so entertaining, so alive, in fact, that we almost forget it had any predecessors.
Alcibiades insists at the outset that he will tell the truth and invites Socrates to see that he does: "if I say anything untrue, interrupt me right in the middle, if you wish, and say that I said it falsely; for I won't willingly say anything false" (214e10–215a2). At the same time, he admits that it isn't easy for someone as drunk as he is to present things "fluently and in the correct order (euporôs kai ephexês)" (215a3–4). Given the importance had by euporia, {124|125} its opposite aporia, and the idea of correct order in the preceding sections of the Symposium, we are duly warned to interpret Alcibiades' speech with care. I shall focus, first, on something within the speech itself, namely, the use of the term agalmata (singular, agalma), and, then, on two other terms related to correct order and its disruption, which are used to contextualize it—epi dexia ('from left to right') and exaiphnês ('all of a sudden'). Euporia and aporia are discussed at various points throughout.
In Plato, an agalma (from the verb agallein, meaning to glorify or honor something) is a figurative statue in honor of a god or, more often, a figurative statue of any sort—the puppets which cast their shadows on the walls of the cave in Republic VII are agalmata (517d7). [3] The question is, can this be what agalmata are for Alcibiades? Initially, the answer seems to be yes: "I say that Socrates is exactly like those silenuses sitting in the statuary shops, the kind the craftsmen manufacture, with flutes or pipes, but when opened in the middle, they prove to have agalmata of the gods inside them" (215a7–b3). But though Silenuses could have been statues that, like Russian dolls, contained smaller statues inside them, "no examples have survived, nor are there any references to such a type of statue except in late passages dependent on this one" (Dover 1980:166). It has been conjectured, indeed, that what Alcibiades is referring to are not statues at all, but moulds for making them (Peters 1976; Rowe 1998a:206). According to François Rabelais, writing in 1534, they were not even moulds, but painted boxes: "a Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box, of the kind we see today in apothecaries' shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies and satyrs" (Cohen 1955:37). [4] Alcibiades' supposedly helpful image of Socrates is almost as plagued by atopia ('strangeness'), therefore, as the man himself (215a3–4).
In the second passage, matters are unclear for a different reason:
As to his appearance—isn't it Silenus-like. Of course it is. His outside covering is like a carved [5] Silenus, but when he is opened, gentlemen and drinking companions, can you guess how he teems with temperance within?… But he is sly and dishonest and spends his whole life {125|126} playing with people. Yet, I don't know whether anyone else has seen the agalmata within when he is in earnest (spoudasantos) and opened up, but I saw them once, and I thought that they were so divine and golden, so marvelously beautiful, that whatever Socrates might bid must, in short, be done. Believing he was earnestly (espoudakenai) pursuing my youthful beauty, I thought it was a stroke of luck and my wonderful good fortune, because by gratifying Socrates I could hear everything he knew. For I was amazingly proud of my vernal bloom.
Symposium 216d4–217a6
We expect Alcibiades to abandon the simile at this point and tell us what it was he actually saw inside Socrates. Instead he perplexingly continues to speak in figural terms: what he saw were agalmata. Since these cannot literally be statues, we are left wondering what they could be. If the sileneuses were moulds, things would be a bit clearer. The agalmata would at least be like statues, since they would be likenesses of Socrates himself as some sort of model or paradigm of temperance. It is a pleasing idea, even if not one on which we can place a great deal of weight—especially once we turn to the third passage.
Confirming the suspicion aroused by the phrase "teems with temperance," it tells us that the agalmata inside Socrates are agalmata of virtue, and that they are also inside his arguments:
But the sort of man this is and his strangeness, both himself and his arguments, one couldn't come close to finding if one looked, neither among people present nor past, except perhaps if one were to compare him to those I mention—not any man, but silenuses and satyrs, him and his arguments. Actually, I left this out at first, that even his arguments are like silenuses that have been opened. For if one is willing to listen to Socrates' arguments, they'd appear quite ridiculous at first; they're wrapped around on the outside with words and phrases like the hide of an outrageous satyr. He talks about pack asses and smiths and cobblers and tanners … but if the arguments are opened and one sees them from the inside, he will find first that they are the only arguments with any sense in them, and next that they're the most god-like and contain the most agalmata of virtue, and that they are relevant to most or rather to all things worth considering for one who intends to be noble and good.
Symposium 221e1–222a6 {126|127}
Now we are well and truly at sea, since an argument could not literally contain a statue—or a likeness of Socrates either, for that matter.
In the seduction scene, agalmata are again present, this time implicit in the response Socrates makes to Alcibiades' sexual overtures:
My dear Alcibiades, you are really not to be taken lightly, if indeed what you say about me happens to be true, and there is in me some power through which you might become better; you would then see inconceivable beauty in me, even surpassing your own immense comeliness of form. But if, seeing it, you are trying to strike a bargain with me to exchange beauty for beauty, then you intend to take no slight advantage of me: on the contrary, you are trying to get possession of what is truly beautiful instead of what merely seems so, and really, you intend to trade bronze for gold.
The repeated "in me," the equivalence of "inconceivable beauty" and "marvelously beautiful," the use of "gold(en)" all serve to make plain that what Alcibiades expects to receive in return for his bronze body are our agalmata. Socrates, however, shows no inclination to endorse the claim that these exist: a cautious "if indeed what you say about me happens to be true" is as far as he will go.
How does Alcibiades imagine that these agalmata might become his? In the seduction scene, he seems to entertain the fantasy of acquiring them through sexual intercourse: "Believing he was earnestly (espoudakenai) pursuing my youthful beauty, I thought it was a stroke of luck and my wonderful good fortune, because by gratifying Socrates I could learn everything he knew" (217a2–5). It is certainly not a fantasy peculiar to him. When Socrates finally arrives at Agathon's, after a sojourn in a neighbor's porch, his host greets him by saying: "Come here, Socrates, and lie down beside me, so that by touching you I'll get the benefit of the wisdom that came to you on the porch" (175c7–d1). The simile with which Socrates responds amplifies the sexual innuendo implicit in the verbs "lie down" (katakeisthai) and "touch" (haptein): [6] "It would indeed be well, Agathon, if wisdom were the sort of thing that might flow (rhein) from the fuller of us into the emptier if only we touch each other, as water flows through a woolen thread from a fuller into an emptier cup. If wisdom is that way too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will be filled from you with wisdom of great {127|128} beauty" (175d4–e2). As agalmata of virtue are fantasized as entering Alcibiades through sexual intercourse, thereby making him "as good as possible" (218d2), so wisdom is fantasized as flowing into Agathon though sexualized contact, making him wise.
Alcibiades' use of the verb "teems" (gemein) at 216d7 is both consonant with this picture and helps fill it out. For though gemein usually just means "to be filled with," which is its most common meaning in Plato, LSJ lists kuein ("to be pregnant") as one of its synonyms. That, no doubt, is why "teems" seemed to R. E. Allen (1991) to be a particularly apposite translation. If Socrates is being imagined as pregnant with agalmata of virtue, however, the latter are themselves being imagined as embryo-like entities. But embryos, it goes without saying, are genuinely like figurative statues, making agalmata an appropriate term for Alcibiades to apply to them.
Though Alcibiades' picture of Socrates as a male pregnant with embryonic virtue is part of a fantasy, it is a fantasy with deep roots in Greek thinking about sexual reproduction. In Aeschylus, for example, Apollo claims that a female serves only as an incubator for an embryo produced exclusively by a male:
She who is called the child's mother is not
Its begetter, but the nurse of the newly sown conception.
The begetter is the male, and she as a stranger for a stranger
Preserves the offspring …
Eumenides 658–661, trans. Lloyd-Jones
We know from Aristotle's Generation of Animals (763b21–23) that a similar theory was advanced by Anaxagoras, who may well have been Aeschylus' source (Sommerstein 1989:206). In a later generation, Diogenes of Apollonia (D-K 64A27) and others also accepted some version of it. It is with this embryological tradition, moreover, that Diotima allies herself earlier in the Symposium, when she portrays reproduction as involving pregnant males seeking females in whom to beget the embryo-like entities they are carrying (208e2–3). [7]
Moreover, she develops her account of the type of psychic pregnancy involved in philosophical paiderastia or boy-love precisely by analogy with such males: {128|129}
Some men are pregnant in respect to their bodies, and turn more to women and are lovers in that way… Others are pregnant in respect to their soul—for there are those, she said, who are still more fertile in their souls than in their bodies with what it pertains to soul to conceive and bear. What then so pertains? Wisdom and the rest of virtue—of which, indeed, all the poets are procreators, and as many craftsmen as are said to be inventors. But the greatest and most beautiful kind of wisdom by far is that concerned with the correct ordering of cities and households, for which the name is temperance and justice. Whenever, then, one of them is pregnant of soul from youth, being divine, and reaches the age when he then desires to bear and procreate, he too, then, I think, goes about seeking the beauty in which he might beget; for he will never beget in the ugly. Now, because he is fertile, he welcomes beautiful rather than ugly bodies, and should he meet with a beautiful and naturally gifted soul, he welcomes the conjunction of the two even more, and to this person he is straightway resourceful in making arguments about virtue and trying to educate him.
Symposium 208e2–209c1
A man pregnant in respect to his soul, then, is pregnant with embryo-like virtues. What he produces when he meets a beautiful boy are arguments about virtue. And it is these that "make young men better" (210c1–3; cf. 218e1–2). In this respect, too, Alcibiades' portrait unwittingly mimics Diotima's—unwittingly, because he has not heard her speak. For when, as an out-of-order afterthought ("Actually, I left this out at first," 221d8), he also locates the agalmata inside Socrates' arguments, he seems to be referring back to an earlier thought in which philosophical discussion not sexual intercourse is the mode of their transmission: "I'd been bitten by something more painful, and in the most painful place one can be bitten—in the heart or soul or whatever one should name it, struck and bitten by arguments in philosophy that hold more fiercely than a serpent, when they take hold of a young and not ill-endowed soul" (218a3–7).
In the critique of writing at the end of the Phaedrus, Socrates himself explicitly invokes very similar ideas. [8] A written argument, he says, like the "offspring of painting," stands there "as if alive." Yet it cannot answer questions or attune itself to the needs of different audiences, and "when it is ill-treated and unjustly abused, it always needs its father to help it; for it is {129|130} incapable of defending or helping itself" (275d4–e5). Its "legitimate brother," however, which is "the living and animate argument of the man who knows, of which a written argument would rightly be called a kind of phantom" is "much better and more capable" in all these departments (276a1–9). Then comes a telling contrast:
The sensible farmer who had some seeds he cared about and wanted to bear fruit—would he sow them in earnest (spoudêi) during the summer in some garden of Adonis, and delight in watching it become beautiful within eight days, or would he do that for playful purposes (paidias) on a feast-day, when he did it at all; whereas for the purposes about which he was in earnest (espoudaken), he would make use of the craft of farming and sow them in appropriate soil, being content if what he sowed reached maturity in the eighth month?
Phaedrus 276b1–8 [9]
Next, based on the contrast, comes an equally telling analogy. The man who has "[seeds] of knowledge about what is just, and what is beautiful, and what is good" will have "no less sensible an attitude toward his seeds than the farmer" (276c3–5). Thus, when others "resort to other sorts of playful amusements (paidiais), watering themselves with symposia," he will amuse himself (paidias, 276d2) by writing "stories about justice and the other virtues," so as to "lay up a store of reminders both for himself, when 'he reaches a forgetful old age', and for anyone who is following the same track, and he will be pleased as he watches their tender growth" (276d1–e3). But when "he is in earnest (spoudê) about them," he instead, "makes use of the craft of dialectic, and taking a fitting soul plants and sows in it arguments accompanied by knowledge (met' epistêmês logous), which are able to help themselves and the man who planted them, and are not without fruit but contain a seed, from which others grow in other soils, capable of rendering it forever immortal, and making the one who has it as happy as it is possible for a man to be" (276e5–277a4). [10] Living arguments (logoi) are now explicitly likened to seeds (spermata)—something on which the Stoics, with their spermatikoi logoi (seminal principles) will capitalize. [11] {130|131}
Though Alcibiades is not mentioned by name in this section of the Phaedrus, he is, I think, lurking in the shadows of Adonis' garden. [12] As part of the Adônia, the feast celebrating the love-affair of Aphrodite and Adonis, and mourning the early death of the latter, women in fifth-century Athens, "sowed seed at midsummer in broken pots and placed these on the rooftops, so that germination was rapidly followed by withering" (OCD ed. 3:12). These were the eponymous gardens. Three things connect them to Alcibiades. First, the fact that the seeds Socrates sowed in him withered quickly: "as soon as I leave [Socrates]," Alcibiades confesses, "I cave in to the honors of the crowd. So I desert him and flee" (216b4–6). Second, the fact that Alcibiades was suspected of involvement in the mutilation of the Herms—statues of the god Hermes—and in the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, both of which occurred in midsummer, right around the Adônia. [13] The use of the technical term "uninitiated" (bebêlos) at Symposium 218b6, strongly suggests that Plato had the latter scandal in mind. He uses the odd term agalma, I am confident, in part to memorialize the former scandal too. The third and most striking connection to Alcibiades, however, is entirely intertextual. In the Symposium, Alcibiades claims that Socrates, while always playing with people about matters of virtue, was in earnest with him about them (216d4–217a6). The Phaedrus, in which play and earnestness about such matters are obsessively contrasted, has obvious critical bearing on his claim. Someone who had "arguments accompanied by knowledge" of "what is just, fine, and good" (276c3–4), it says, would never, except for playful purposes, sow them in a garden of Adonis like Alcibiades, whose planting-season (adolescence) was long passed by the time Socrates entered his life (cf. Alcibiades I 131c5–d8). Socrates, we may infer, either did not possess the sort of knowledge-conferring agalmata of virtue Alcibiades describes or (which we can surely rule out) was merely playing with him too.
If, as we should, we seek the specifically social or cultural origins of logoi as spermata/agalmata, the obvious place to look is the complex ideology of Athenian paiderastia, which Diotima explicitly adapts to her philosophical purposes. It is an ideology that seeks to negotiate between ideals of masculinity and the somewhat conflicting reality of male desire. The salient issue is, what is it to be a man?—in the sense of who has manly control of his appetites and desires and who, like a woman or a slave, does not (Davidson 1998:139–182, 250–277). What a boy who desired to be sexually penetrated by his lover was {131|132} in danger of being thought was not primarily a passive penetratee, as Michel Foucault famously argued, but a katapugôn, a kinaidos, a "sex addict" or "slut" as we might say—someone too enslaved to his appetites, too much of an un-fillable or insatiably leaky vessel, to be trusted with citizenly power. [14] Hence the boy's desire had to be ideologically refigured as something more appropriate—a desire to be a slave to his lover for the sake not of sexual pleasure, but of virtue (184c2–7, 219e3–5). At the same time, the sexual desire of the lover had also to be refigured as educative rather than orgasmic or ejaculatory in intent. Boy-love became implicitly divided, as a result, into what Pausanias calls (good) Uranian love, whose object is the soul and whose aim is to instill virtue in the boy, and (bad) Pandemotic love, whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the lover (180c1–d7). Sexual intercourse and the inculcation of virtue thus become so metonymically related, their conceptual fields so fused, that spermatikoi logoi took on the aura of a natural kind.
While the strategy of getting hold of Socrates' golden agalmata through philosophical discussion is less an obvious fantasy than the explicitly sexual strategy we looked at earlier, it has a manifest defect. It does not immediately explain why anything statue-like should be involved in Alcibiades' conception of the process. Nonetheless, it does add something important. It explains why Alcibiades thinks there is something in Socrates that is virtue-relevant—something the sexual strategy allows him to characterize as he does. What generally happens to those who see him in elenctic action, Socrates tells us, is that they infer that he is wise about the subjects on which he examines others (Apology 23a3–5). When Alcibiades describes him as "sly and dishonest (eirôneuomenos)," and as spending his whole life "playing with people" (216e4–5), he shows himself to have done precisely that. But his description is true only if he believes that Socrates is a disingenuous eirôn—an ironist as we riskily say [15] —because, like everyone else, he imagines that something like knowledge-conferring agalmata must exist in him to account for his elenctic competence. "By gratifying Socrates," he says, "I could learn everything he knew" (217a4–5).
When Socrates tacitly accepts this description by not objecting, he does so, I surmise, because he understands it as the consequent of a conditional, the antecedent of which the description itself records him as not having corrobo{132|133}rated (218e1–2). What he tacitly accepts, then, is just this: "if I have agalmata in me, of the sort that provide me with knowledge of virtue, then I am sly and dishonest and do spend my life playing with people." That he has such knowledge of virtue, however, whether deriving from agalmata or not, is something he always denies:
In fact, gentlemen, it's pretty certainly the god who is really wise, and by his oracle he meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. And it seems that when he refers to the Socrates here before you, and uses my name, he makes me an example, as if he were to say: "That one among you is wisest, mortals, who, like Socrates, has recognized that he's truly worthless where wisdom's concerned."
Apology 23a5–b4
Alcibiades' sense of privilege—"I don't know whether anyone else has seen the agalmata within when he is in earnest and opened up, but I saw them once"—stands diagnosed, then, as a common illusion.
Though as hesitant to claim that he has any knowledge-conferring agalmata of virtue within him as that he has any knowledge of virtue itself, Socrates does make an apparently grand epistemic claim in the Symposium. "I claim to know nothing," he insouciantly says, "except ta erôtika" (177d8–9). What exactly is he claiming? Literally translated, ta erôtika are "the things of love." But just as ta phusika is "[the science of] physics" and ta politika is "[the art or craft of] politics," ta erôtika is "the craft of love" (hê erôtikê technê)—the one the god Eros gives to Socrates in the Phaedrus (257a3–9). And that raises a problem; in fact, two problems. The first is to explain how it can be true, as Socrates puts it, that "I myself honor and surpassingly devote myself to the craft of love and exhort (parakeleuomai) others to do the same" (212b5–7). I mean, where do we see him doing that? The other is to reconcile his knowing that craft with his general epistemic modesty, with his characterization of himself as wise "in neither a great nor a small way" (Apology 21b4–5). How can the man who has no worthwhile wisdom possibly know something as apparently important and difficult as the art or craft of love?
To these questions the Lysis offers appealing clues. [16] Hippothales, like a true Socratic, loves beautiful boys and philosophical arguments (203b6–204a3). But what he does to win Lysis' love is sing eulogies to him. And that, Socrates argues, no master of the craft of love would ever do: {133|134}
If you make a conquest of a boy like this, then everything you've said and sung turns out to eulogize yourself as victor in having won such a boyfriend. But if he gets away, then the greater your praise of his beauty and goodness, the more you will seem to have lost and the more you will be ridiculed. That is why someone who is wise in the craft of love doesn't praise his beloved until he has him: he fears how the future may turn out. And besides, these beautiful boys get swelled heads if anyone praises them and start to think they're really somebody.
Lysis 205e2–206a4
Convinced, Hippothales turns to Socrates: "What different advice can you give me about what someone should say or do to get his prospective boyfriend to love him?" (206c1–3). Unlike in the Symposium, where he is laconic, Socrates goes into detail: "if you're willing to have him talk with me, I might be able to give you a demonstration (epideixai) of how to carry on a discussion with him" (206c4–6). [17] An elenctic examination of Lysis quickly ensues.
"This is how you should talk to your boyfriends, Hippothales," Socrates says when the examination is finished, "making them humble and drawing in their sails, instead of swelling them up and spoiling them, as you do" (210e2–5). What he goes on to say about philosophy, however, shows elenctic discussion to be much more than merely chastening (cf. Symposium 204a1–b5):
Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom (philosophein), whether they are gods or men. Neither do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid person loves wisdom. There remains only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don't know.
Lysis 218a2–b1
By showing Lysis that he isn't already wise, by getting him to recognize that he doesn't know, Socrates is setting him on the right road to love—the one that leads to the love of wisdom, and so to the beautiful itself. [18] Just how that solves Hippothales' problem of getting Lysis to love him is another matter—one we will need Diotima's metaphysics to solve. {134|135}
As a philosopher himself, Socrates does not know the answers to his own questions about virtue, and so really is "wise in neither a great nor a small way." Yet, unlike those he examines, he knows that he doesn't know, that he lacks wisdom. What gives him that knowledge is the one craft he does possess—the craft of asking questions. It is what makes him a lover of wisdom, therefore, and so is itself the craft of (producing) love. And questioning, of course, is what we do see Socrates devoting himself to and exhorting others to practice (Apology 29d2–30a2, [19] 38a1–6). Socrates' claim to know the craft of love reveals a deep truth about him, therefore—so deep, in fact, that it appears to have been encoded in language itself by the possibly divine "rule-setter" who made it: "The name 'hero' (hêrôs) is only a slightly altered form of the word 'love' (erôs)—the very thing from which the heroes sprang. And either this is the reason they were called 'heroes' or else because they were sophists, clever speech-makers and dialecticians, skilled at questioning (erôtan)" (Cratylus 398c5–e5). Add eirôn to the etymological mix, and you have Socrates—questioner, lover, philosopher hero, "ironist"—as truly a gift of the god (Apology 30d7–e1)!
The identification of the craft of love with that of asking questions, while compatible with Socrates' usual modus operandi and disavowal of wisdom, is not entirely problem free. For Diotima, as the one who taught Socrates the former craft (Symposium 201d5), characterizes it as leading to scientific knowledge (211b8–d1). Did Socrates really have wisdom, then, while dishonestly disavowing it? Was Alcibiades right in thinking that he had glimpsed "truly beautiful things" (219a1) within him? Perhaps, it is sufficient here to take a way out suggested by Diotima herself. Socrates, she is fairly confident, could be instructed in part of the craft of love (the so-called "lesser mysteries"), in which the philosophical lover gives birth to beautiful arguments about the virtues when he finds a boy beautiful in body and soul (209a1–c7). But about the part where scientific knowledge of the beautiful is acquired, Diotima is more circumspect: "as for those parts relating to the final revelation [of the beautiful itself], the ones for whose sake I've taught you the others [the "lesser mysteries"], I don't know whether you would be capable of being initiated into them" (210a1–2). It is noteworthy that Alcibiades' own characterization of the Socratic arguments he has heard as "wrapped around on the outside with words and phrases like the hide of an outrageous satyr," and as being about "pack asses and smiths and cobblers and tanners," while it fits the arguments we see Socrates giving in the so-called early dialogues, doesn't fit the sublime {135|136} lessons he learns from Diotima. Like the very fact that Socrates has had to learn them from her, this suggests, as many have argued, that they are not Socratic in provenance, but Platonic—something, as I put it elsewhere, that Plato gave birth to in the beauty of Socrates (Reeve 2004:96).
"A thing that desires, desires what it lacks," the Lysis tells us (221d7–e2). The Symposium delivers the same message yet more stridently: "what is not at hand, what is not present, what one does not have, what one is not oneself, and what one lacks—desire and Eros are of such things as these" (200e2–5). In Republic IX, this picture of desire gets tied explicitly to the theory of forms. Hunger, thirst, and the like, are "some sorts of emptiness related to the state of the body," while "foolishness and lack of knowledge" are "some sorts of emptiness related to the state of the soul." Nourishment fills the former; "true belief, knowledge, understanding, and, in sum, all of virtue," the latter. But these fillings are not on a par. Nourishment fills temporarily—it is soon digested or excreted; virtue fills permanently, because, as something that always is what it is, it partakes more of "pure being" than nourishment does, and so "is more" than it (585a8–b8). Since the things that that are more—that fully are (what they are)—are the Platonic forms (Republic 475c6–480a13), it is only when the true lover of boys reaches these—or, more particularly, the beautiful itself—that his desires are satisfied, his emptinesses truly filled, his happiness assured (Symposium 210e2–212a7). The elenchus is important to love in part because it reveals the presence of these emptinesses—emptinesses which, because they were concealed or occluded by the false conceit of knowledge, were erotically inert. The revelation of a hunger thereby becomes a sort of feeding: "When a man has his mouth so full of food that he is prevented from eating, and is likely to starve in consequence, does giving him food consist in stuffing still more of it in his mouth or does it consist in taking some of it away, so that he can begin to eat?" (Kierkegaard 1941:245n). [20]
A philosopher who encounters a boy with "a godlike face or some form of body which imitates beauty well," Socrates tells us in the Phaedrus, [21] "reveres it like a god as he looks at it, and if he were not afraid of appearing thoroughly mad would sacrifice to his beloved as if to an agalma of a god" (251a1–7). In this regard, he is no different from any other recently reincarnated lover who still remembers vividly the forms he glimpsed as he traversed the heavens in the chorus of his patron—because character-defining—god: {136|137}
So each selects his love from the ranks of the beautiful according to his own disposition, and fashions and adorns him like an agalma, as if he were himself his god, in order to honor him and celebrate his mystic rites. And so those who belong to Zeus seek that the one they love should be someone like Zeus in respect of his soul; so they look to see whether he is naturally disposed towards philosophy, and when they have found him and fall in love they do everything to make him of such a kind. So if they have not previously set foot in this way, they undertake it now, both learning from wherever they can and finding out for themselves; and as they follow the scent from within themselves to the discovery of the nature of their own god, they find the means to it through the compulsion on them to gaze intensely on the god, and grasping him through memory, and possessed by him, they take their habits and ways from him, to the extent that it is possible for a man to share in god; and because they count their beloved responsible for these very things they love him still more, and if it is from Zeus that they draw, like Bacchants, they pour the draught over the soul of their loved one and make him as like their god as possible.
Phaedrus 252d5–253b1
Here it is the boy's face, body, and soul that are agalmata, and the philosopher who is drawn by them, through anamnêsis, to philosophy, god-likeness, and the philosophical education of his beloved. It is into him, not into the boy, that a strange fluid flows:
"nourishment … flows in" upon him (epirrueisês de tês trophês, 251b5); he "receives the stream of beauty in through the eyes" (dexamenos gar tou kallous tên aporroên dia tôn ommatôn, 251b1–2); and, as he gazes upon the beauty of the beloved, his soul "receives particles from there that come at him in a stream" (ekeithen merê epionta kai rheont' … dechomenê, 251c).
Nightingale 2004:159
The effect of such influx is not satiation or filling up, moreover, since the name of the particles (merê) that come at (epionta) the philosopher in a stream (rheonta) is himeros—desire (251c6–7). It is these now activated desires, in turn, that eventually lead to the learning and investigation that enable the philosopher to "gaze intently" on Zeus. The fluid he draws like a draught from this divine source is what really nourishes him and what he then pours over the {137|138} soul of his boyfriend (253a6–b1). If the effect of such pouring is to make the latter "as like their god as possible," we may infer, it must serve as stimulus rather than satisfier for his desires too, leading him to hunger for philosophy, Zeus, and the Platonic forms. The inversion of the description Alcibiades gives—memorialized by the use of the term agalma—could hardly be more complete. When he refers to "the madness and Bacchic frenzy of philosophy" (Symposium 218b4), therefore, we may be confident that he has in mind not the "parts of madness on the right-hand side" of the definitional division, which are identified with "divine," non-genital, philosophical love, but those of the bad madness on the left, which are identified with sexual love (Phaedrus 266a3–b1).
Even when a philosopher has climbed Diotima's ladder to the very top and has seen the form of the beautiful, then, what he has in him for his beloved boy isn't what would fill up his emptinesses, but what would activate them, turn them into effective motives to philosophical inquiry. No Platonic philosopher, one might say, no matter how wise and knowledgeable, can ever be more than a Socrates to another person! One must see the forms for oneself. For this reason, too, agalmata is a peculiarly appropriate term to use for what such a philosopher does have in him. For an agalma originally had no "relation whatsoever to the idea of resemblance or imitation, of figural representation in the strict sense." Instead, it was something the aim of which was "to construct a bridge, as it were," that would reach "toward the divine." Yet "at the same time and in the same figure," it had to "mark its distance from that domain in relation to the human world." It had to make the divine power present, yet it had also to emphasize "what is inaccessible and mysterious in divinity, its alien quality, its otherness" (Vernant 1991:152–153). Like what is in a Platonic philosopher for another, agalmata are a bridge to something else—an image for what is itself necessarily beyond images (Symposium 212a4–5).
The idea of agalmata as a bridge between human and divine is bound to remind us of Diotima's characterization of Eros as a daimôn—a being "intermediate between god and mortal" (202d11–e1). "Ever poor," "rough and hard," "unshod," "dwelling ever with want," "courageous," and "a lover of wisdom through the whole of life," Eros sounds remarkably similar to Socrates himself (203c6–d8), whom Alcibiades actually describes as a "genuine daimôn" (219b7–c1). But that implies that Socrates is, in the relevant respect, also remarkably similar to an agalma, and it to him. Like the conjecture mentioned earlier that Alcibiades' openable silenuses are really statue moulds, this has the effect of turning the agalmata inside Socrates into statues of himself. Though Alcibiades claims to have seen these agalmata before he tried to seduce Socrates, it is {138|139} noteworthy that in the penultimate section of his speech, it is the figure of Socrates as a model of virtue that is front and center. Whether in resisting Alcibiades' beautiful body, or on campaign at Potidaea or Delium, he is the paradigm of wisdom, temperance, fortitude, and courage (219d3–221c1).
The phrase euporei logon peri arêtes ("resourceful in making arguments about virtue"), applied by Diotima to the pregnant and properly philosophical lover of boys (209b8), finds a parallel in Alcibiades' last words about Socrates, which are also, in fact, his last words sans phrase: "It's the same old story … When Socrates is around, it's impossible for anyone else to get a share of the beauties. Now, too, see how resourcefully (euporôs) he's found a convincing argument (logon) to make this fellow [Agathon] lie down beside him" (223a6–9). They are words carefully prepared for. "Was I not prophetic," Socrates says, "when I said just now that Agathon would speak wonderfully and I would be at a loss (aporêsoimi)." "As to you being at a loss (aporêsein)," Eryximachus replies, "I doubt it." "And how am I not to be at a loss (aporein)," Socrates responds, using the verb for the third time, "after so beautiful and so varied a speech" (198a5–b3). In Diotima's story of Poros and Penia, we discover how potentially deceptive they are:
Because Eros is the son of Poros and Penia, this is his fortune: first, he is ever poor, and far from being delicate and beautiful, as most people suppose, he on the contrary is rough and hard and unshod, ever lying on the ground without bedding, sleeping in doorsteps and beside roads under the open sky. Because he has his mother's nature he dwells ever with lack. But on the other hand, by favor of his father, he ever plots for good and beautiful things, because he is courageous, eager and intense, and a clever hunter ever weaving some new device, desiring wisdom and capable of it, a philosopher through the whole of life, clever at enchantment, a sorcerer, and a sophist. And he is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but sometimes on the same day he lives and flourishes, whenever he is resourceful (euporêsêi), but then he dies and comes back to life again by reason of the nature of his father, though what is provided (porizomenon) ever flows away, so that Eros is never rich nor at a loss (aporei), and is, on the contrary, in between wisdom and ignorance. For things stand thus: no god loves wisdom or desires to become wise—for he is so; nor, if anyone else is wise, does he love wisdom. On the other hand, neither do the ignorant love wisdom nor desire to become wise; for ignorance is difficult just in this, that though {139|140} not beautiful and good, nor wise, it yet seems to itself to be sufficient. He who does not think himself in need does not desire what he does not think he lacks.
Symposium 203c5–204a7
Just as Socrates turns Athenian paiderastia upside down by playing the part of the pursued boy rather than of the pursuing older lover (222b3–4), the source of agalmata rather than their recipient, so, by means of his skill at asking questions, he turns aporia into euporia, emptiness into a resource. What as a philosopher he desires, however, isn't to lie down with Agathon ("Mr. Goodman"), as Alcibiades claims, but to have intercourse with the Platonic form that shares his—much punned upon—name. Alcibiades' suggestion otherwise is a genuine profanation of mysteries—not the Eleusinian this time, but the philosophical ones Diotima has modeled on them (see Sheffield 2001b).
One might say the same, I think, about the way Alcibiades experiences the aporia Socrates induces in him:
I wrapped my own cloak around him—for it was winter—and I lay down on his threadbare coat, and I put my two arms around this genuine daimôn, this wonderful man, and lay there the whole night through. And, again, Socrates, you will not say I speak falsely. But when I did this, he was so contemptuous of my youthful bloom that he ridiculed and outrageously insulted it; and in that regard, at least, I thought I was really something, gentlemen and judges—for you are judges of the arrogance of Socrates—for know well, by gods and by goddesses, when I arose after having slept with Socrates, it was nothing more than if I'd slept with a father or with an elder brother. Can you imagine my state of mind after that? I considered myself affronted, and yet I admired his nature, his temperance and courage, having met a man of a sort I never thought to meet in respect to wisdom and fortitude. The result was that I could neither get angry and be deprived of his company nor was I resourceful enough (êuporoun) to win him over. For I well knew he was far more invulnerable to money than Ajax was to iron, and he'd escaped me in the only way I thought he could be caught. So I was at a loss (êporoun), and went around enslaved by this man as no one ever was by any other.
Symposium 219b5–e5 {140|141}
What should be experienced as a resource that can lead to the forms of the good or the beautiful is instead experienced as a genuine loss, recoupable only by gaining possession, through seduction or bribery (the only genuine resources Alcibiades seems to recognize), of Socrates himself, and the agalmata-based wisdom he is imagined to contain. The idea that Socrates' love could be won only through joining him in leading the philosophically examined life seems hopelessly far away.
An important passage in Republic VI strongly suggests that this negative interpretation of Alcibiades is very much a part of Plato's own. In it Socrates is explaining why philosophers have an undeservedly bad reputation, and what the real effect is on their souls of contemplating Platonic forms:
The harshness of the masses towards philosophy is caused by those outsiders who do not belong and who have burst in like a band of revelers (epeiskekômakotas), abusing one another, indulging their love of quarreling, and always arguing about human beings—something that is least appropriate in philosophy … For surely, someone whose mind is truly directed towards the things that are has not the leisure to look down at human affairs, and be filled with malice and hatred as a result of entering into their disputes. Instead, as he looks at and contemplates things that are orderly and always the same, that neither do injustice to one another nor suffer it, being all in a rational order, he imitates them and tries to become as like them as he can. Or do you think there is any way to prevent someone from associating with something he admires without imitating it? … Then the philosopher, by associating with what is orderly (kosmiôi) and divine becomes as divine and orderly as a human being can. Though, mind you, there is always plenty of slander (diabolê) around.
Republic 500b1–d2
Alcibiades, notice, accuses Socrates of "abusing" him (Symposium 213d2), and then proceeds to give a speech entirely about human beings, which is therefore as anti-the-philosopher-Socrates as possible. No wonder, then, that it is represented by the latter as slanderous in intent: "as though you hadn't said it all to sow slander (diaballein) between me and Agathon" (222c7–d1; also 222d6). Finally, there is the "crowd of revelers (kômastas)" that shows up at the end of the Symposium (223b1–2) and, finding Agathon's doors as "open" (223b3) as Alcibiades thought he had found Socrates, bursts in and puts an end to all "order (kosmôi)" (223b4–5). The echoes are surely too insistent to be accidental. {141|142}
The order the revelers literally destroy is that established by Eryximachus in his role as master of ceremonies—"I think each of us should make as beautiful a speech as he can in praise of Eros, from left to right (epi dexia)" (177d1–2). When Alcibiades arrives late at the party, Eryximachus tries to impose it on him too:
Before you came, it seemed best that each of us, from left to right (epi dexia) should give the most beautiful speech about Eros he could and offer an encomium. The rest of us have all spoken; but since you haven't and you've finished your drink, you ought to speak too. Once you've done so, you can prescribe for Socrates as you wish, and he for the man on his right (epi dexia), and so on for the rest.
Symposium 214b9–c5
As we have seen, however, Alcibiades does not really follow the rule, since he speaks not about Eros, but a human being (214d2–10)—albeit one who is like Eros. Later, however, when Aristodemus wakes up, he finds order restored: "only Agathon and Aristophanes and Socrates were still awake, drinking from a large bowl, and passing it from left to right (epi dexia)" (223c4–5). I take this to imply that Alcibiades and the crowd of revelers—and the disorder they represent—have gone. But perhaps, like some others, they have simply gone to sleep.
This order, this movement of love (or of the logoi about it) around Agathon's table, is literally symposiastic, but it is also allegorical. It is related, first and most obviously, to the order discerned in love by dialectic in the Phaedrus, where, as we saw good philosophical love is identified with the parts of madness "on the right-hand side (dexiai)" of the definitional division (266a3–b1). But it is also related to "the movement of the Same," which the Demiurge in the Timaeus "made revolve toward the right (epi dexia) by way of the side" (36c5–6). For like dialectic, and the divisions and collections of which Socrates proclaims himself a lover (Phaedrus 266b3–4), this movement, too, is associated with philosophy: "whenever an argument concerns an object of reason, and the circle of the Same runs well (euporos) and reveals it, the necessary result is understanding and knowledge" (Timaeus 37c1–3).
What these allegorical aspects of epi dexia mean within the Symposium emerges when we turn to Diotima's philosophical demythologizing of the story of Poros and Penia discussed above. If those already filled with wisdom, and so touching all the Platonic forms, neither love nor desire anything, what happens to the philosopher who reaches the goal of education in the craft of {142|143} love? Is his love wrecked by its very success? In Diotima's view, the answer is no. The philosopher's desire, like that of all lovers, isn't to possess the beautiful or the good for a moment, but to have it be his "forever" (206a3–13). Concealed in every desire or love, therefore, is "the love of immortality" (207a3–4). But the closest a mortal creature can come to gratifying that love is a far cry from the permanent satisfaction achieved by the gods:
Mortal nature seeks so far as it can to exist forever and be immortal. It can do so only in this way, by giving birth, ever leaving behind a different new thing in place of the old, since even in the time in which each single living creature is said to live and be the same—for example, as a man is said to live and be the same from youth to old age—though he never has the same things in himself, he nevertheless is called the same, but he is ever becoming new while otherwise perishing, in respect to hair and flesh and bone and blood and the entire body. And not only in respect to the body but also in respect to the soul, its character and habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears are each never present in each man as the same, but some are coming to be, others perishing. Much more extraordinary still, not only are some items of knowledge coming to be and others perishing in us, and we are never the same even in respect to items of knowledge, but also each single one among the items of knowledge is affected in the same way. For what is called practicing exists because knowledge leaves us; forgetting is departure of knowledge, but practice, by introducing a new memory in place of what departs, preserves the knowledge so that it seems to be the same. For it is in this way that all that is mortal is preserved: not by being ever completely the same, like the divine, but by leaving behind, as it departs and becomes older, a different new thing of the same sort that it was. By this device … what is mortal has a share of immortality both body and everything else; but what is immortal by another device. [22]
Symposium 207d1–208b4 {143|144}
Thus, when the philosopher reaches the beautiful itself, his task, just because he is mortal, is by no means complete. To stay in touch with the beautiful, each item of knowledge that is his knowing or contemplation of it must give birth to another like it—just as, if he himself is to stay alive, each of his person-stages or time-slices, as we call them, must give birth to another.
One effect of this way of thinking, as Derek Parfit has famously argued in our own time, is to blur or soften the distinction between self and others, and with it the distinction between egoism and altruism (Parfit 1984:199–347). There is little doubt, I think, that Plato is aware of this effect and seeks to exploit it. What a philosopher begets in the true beauty of the beautiful itself, is the good thing that is his own "true virtue." And it is with the nurturing of it that he is first concerned. Since he is a changing or metabolizing creature, however, what he has to do to remain virtuous—to keep that good thing—is to give birth to a later stage of himself that is virtuous too. This later self, as a case of possessing good things himself, is also something he loves, and for the same reason as he loves his present self as such a case: when a person becomes virtuous, the Republic tells us, he thereby "becomes his own friend (philon genomenon heautôi)" (443d5). [23] Pregnant with virtue, then, and ever ready to give birth to it in true beauty, the philosopher meets a boy that he, using the beautiful itself as his standard of beauty (211d3–5), finds beautiful, and so "seeks to educate." That is, he seeks to make the boy, too, a virtuous lover of wisdom—something "of the same sort" as himself. If he succeeds, the boy will be his "offshoot" (208b4–6), and will be loved as his own future selves are loved, and for exactly the same reason—the boy stands to him (to his present self) precisely as they do. Egoism has moved closer to altruism; self-interest to something more impersonal. If we look at this from the point of view of the boy, we can see why Socrates' elenctic demonstrations do show Hermogenes how to get Lysis to love him. An elenchus of another is always at the same time, Socrates claims, a self-examination (Apology 38a4–5, Charmides 166c7–d2, Gorgias 506a3–5). Thus if Hermogenes, like Lysis, is a nascent philosopher, their elenctic conversations will make each the other's second self, every bit as much beloved as the first. [24] The true path to gaining Socrates' love is thus laid out.
"I think," says Diotima, "that in touching tou kalou and holding familiar intercourse autôi, he bears and begets what he has long since been pregnant {144|145} with" (209c2–4). Is it the boy or the beautiful she's talking about? A happy ambiguity (tou kalou and autôi could be either masculine or neuter) allows her to superimpose on one another, as it were, what I have presented as two separate events—the philosopher's giving birth in the true beauty of the beautiful itself to what we would all intuitively consider to be his own later self, and his giving birth in a beautiful boy to what Diotima's own theory of the self invites us to see as such.
As prominent in the Symposium as the fourfold repetition of epi dexia, and as deeply associated with Alcibiades, is the fourfold repetition of exaiphnês ("all of a sudden"): exaiphnês, the true lover catches sight of the beautiful itself (210e4–5); exaiphnês, Alcibiades arrives at Agathon's house (212c6); exaiphnês, Socrates turns up in Alcibiades' life (213c1); exaiphnês, the crowd of revelers burst in (223b2–6). What suddenly turns up in each case is a candidate object of love: the beautiful itself for the philosopher's love; Alcibiades for Socrates'; Socrates for Alcibiades'. As for the crowd (pampollous) of revelers, they are the object that successfully competes with Socrates for Alcibiades' love, since it is to "the honors of the crowd (tôn pollôn)" that Alcibiades caves in when not by Socrates' side (216b4–6).
For what suddenly turns up—what lands the coup de foudre—to be truly beautiful, however, to be what is really loved, it has to come at the right place in an order that is, first and foremost, an education-induced order in the lover's own soul. This is something on which Diotima is insistent:
It is necessary for him who proceeds correctly in this matter to begin while still young by going to beautiful bodies; and first, if his guide guides correctly … he who has been educated in the craft of love up to this point, beholding beautiful things in the correct order (ephexês) [25] and way, will then suddenly, in an instant, proceeding at that point to the goal of the craft of love, see something marvelous, beautiful in nature.
Symposium 210a4–e5
But the importance of proper order doesn't end there. To stay in touch with the beautiful itself, the psychological order thus acquired must be sustained. Like Socrates' own fabled orderliness it must be of a sort that neither wine, nor sexual desire, nor extremes of hot or cold, nor lack of sleep, nor normal human weakness can disrupt. Expressed figuratively as a movement, it must be that of the circle of the Same. {145|146}
With one clear exception, prior to the arrival of Alcibiades, Eryximachus' left-to-right order is followed until all those present have spoken (214c2). The clear exception is Aristophanes. [26] He should have spoken after Pausanias, but he got the hiccups, and so yielded his turn to Eryximachus, who praises orderly, harmonious, pious, temperate love, while condemning "the Pandemotic Eros of the many-tuned Muse Polyhymnia." [27] Comedy, which Aristophanes represents, is thus presented as a backward turn, a step in as anti-philosophical a direction as the "satyr play—or rather Silenus play" of Alcibiades (222d3–4). As in real life, so in the Symposium, neither Aristophanes nor Alcibiades is a true friend or lover of Socrates.
I said at the beginning that Alcibiades' portrait of Socrates is the theatrical apogee of the Symposium. That we find it so is a measure of how interesting we find Socrates as a person, and "human affairs" more generally—how much we like laughter, intoxication, disorder. It is an interest that aligns us with the anonymous friends of Apollodorus whose desire to hear about what happened at Agathon's house results, as we are invited to suppose, in our interest being gloriously satisfied. Yet the Symposium, of which the story of Apollodorus and his friends is a part, diagnoses that interest as dangerously un-philosophical, as potentially an interest in the wrong things. It isn't Socrates we should be interested in, but philosophy and the forms. Alcibiades' speech is filled with human interest. There is no doubt about that. Yet, as neither euporôs nor ephexês nor epi dexia, it is the work of an unreliable narrator—the product of a life which, torn between shame and the desire for the approval of the masses (216b3–6), self-confessedly does not itself run well (êporoun, 219e3). In part because of the conceptual-density of the term agalmata and the skill with which Plato exploits it, however, there is a reading of the speech in which the image it presents of Socrates is uncannily correct. Socrates and his arguments do have agalmata of virtue in them. Just not ones that, like a randy lover's embryo-containing semen, are there for the easy taking. To get hold of them, you must change your life. {146|147}
[ back ] 1. This is a revised version of the paper I gave at the conference. The revisions sufficiently changed the thrust of the paper to require a new title. I am grateful to all of the conferees, especially Ruby Blondell for reminding me (again!) about the etymology of agalma, Christopher Rowe for demanding more about ta erôtika, and Gabriel Richardson Lear for being sufficiently puzzled by some remarks about Kant that I omitted them. Helpful written comments from Frisbee Sheffield, Jim Lesher, and an anonymous referee led to further significant changes. Thanks, finally, to Jim Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield for organizing the conference and inviting me to participate, and to Gregory Nagy and the staff of CHS for hosting it in such style.
[ back ] 2. Translations, sometimes silently modified in minor ways, are from Allen 1991.
[ back ] 3. A glance at the occurrences recorded in Brandwood 1976 will bear this out: Charmides 154c8, Critias 110b5, 116d7, e4, Epinomis 983e6, 984a4, 5, Laws 738c6, 931a1, 6, d6, e6, 956b1, Meno 97d6, Philebus 38d10, Phaedrus 230b8, 251a6, 252d7, Protagoras 322a5, Timaeus 37c7. Agalmatopoios ('sculptor' or 'statue-maker') occurs at Protagoras 311c7, 8, e2. More generally, though, "anything on which one agalletai" (Griffith 1999:243), such as a child (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 208) or fame (Sophocles, Antigone 704), can be an agalma.
[ back ] 4. Thanks to Scott LaBarge for this reference.
[ back ] 5. Geglumenos silênos: gluphein also means to hollow out (as one might a mould).
[ back ] 6. LSJ cites Laws 840a4 and Aristotle, Politics 1335b40.
[ back ] 7. The fact that she earlier claims that "all human beings (anthrôpoi) are pregnant in respect to both the body and the soul" (206c1–2) may mean that her allegiance is less than whole-hearted. But since, in the sequel, only males are ever pregnant in soul, her expression may simply be imprecise: by anthrôpoi she means male human beings. What that means for her own odd status is another question.
[ back ] 8. Translations are from Rowe 1986.
[ back ] 9. Many thanks to Julia Annas for correcting an oversight in my initial account of this passage.
[ back ] 10. I cannot resist noticing the reference to symposia as amusements that Plato—who else?—would rather write books than attend!
[ back ] 11. See e.g. SVF 1.497, 2.780, 1027, 1074, 3.141. I am grateful to David Sedley for advice on this Stoic doctrine.
[ back ] 12. As he is at Republic 494c4–495b7. See Adam (1902).
[ back ] 13. See Thucydides 6.27.
[ back ] 14. Problems 4.23, attributed to Aristotle, but probably dating from the third century BCE, is revelatory in this regard. In men who have "a superfluity of semen" or whose sperm ducts are blocked, semen collects in their rectum, instead of being discharged in the natural way. Unable to find release in normal sexual intercourse, they desire "friction in the place where the semen collects." But since this doesn't result in seminal discharge "they are insatiable or unfillable (aplêston) just like women."
[ back ] 15. See Vlastos 1991:21–44 and Nehamas 1998:19–98 for some risk assessment.
[ back ] 16. Translations are from Lombardo (1997).
[ back ] 17. "Periods of silent absorption," are not, therefore, "the closest Socrates comes to public display, or epideixis" (Hunter 2004:33).
[ back ] 18. Cf. Sophist 231b3–8: "the refutation of the empty belief in one's own wisdom is nothing other than our noble sophistry."
[ back ] 19. Note, especially, parakeleuomenos at 29d5.
[ back ] 20. I owe notice of this passage to J. Lear (2004:106–107), a book no student of Socratic irony can afford to miss.
[ back ] 21. I am grateful to Diskin Clay for encouraging me to look again at these texts.
[ back ] 22. It is an interesting question whether this account applies to all parts of the human soul in all circumstances, or only, as the Republic suggests, to the "form it takes in human life," when, encrusted with bodily appetites, its true nature, like that of the sea-god Glaucus, is disguised (612a5–6). If, when separate from the body and the other elements present in the embodied soul, the rational element is truly immortal and divine, truly a vessel from which knowledge never leaks away, then what applies to the gods will apply also to it.
[ back ] 23. Thanks to Jim Lesher for reminding me of this text.
[ back ] 24. In Reeve 1992a:173–183, I argue that we should understand Aristotle's views on virtuous friends in a similar way. Such friends are each other's "second selves" in part because they help produce one another as virtuous.
[ back ] 25. The word Alcibiades uses to describe what his description of Socrates will precisely not manifest.
[ back ] 26. The unclear case is Aristodemus, the narrator, who, because he is lying next to Eryximachus (175a3–5), should presumably have spoken after him had Aristophanes not take his turn.
[ back ] 27. Note kosmios at 187a5, d5, 188a3, c3, 189a3.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This weekend was seriously the best you guys! John and I made it safe and sound to California and have had a blast celebrating my birthday and the love of some very good friends. It was a busy weekend though, so its been nice to take a little break yesterday and just relax.
For my birthday, my mom took me shopping, which is one of my favorite things to do because I always find good things when I'm with her, plus its fun to just spend the day having one on one time with my momma. Also, since my birthday is the mark of fall, I always stock up on my favorite fall items.
This season has probably been one of my favorite ones yet, though in regards to fashion. It seems like everything is the perfect shade of fall – garnet, mustard yellow, heather gray, and gorgeous camel brown and styles are all about keeping it comfortable. I love that because let's be real, if you have gotten to know me at ALL, I'm allll about the comfort. With that in mind, I decided to round up some of my favorite fall finds!
First things first –> my fall go-to bootie. These ones by Kristin Cavallari are so cute and are the perfect shade for fall. They are super comfy and I love that my skinny jeans fit perfectly inside them. You are going to see these a lot from now, through winter haha.
Next up is a long sweater. This style is everywhere right now and I love the price point on this one. Leith does a really great job in providing great staple pieces at an affordable price point with excellent quality product. Plus, I love this color. It is so refreshing and would be easy to style with anything. I initially bought mine in grey, but I'm thinking I may need another….
One thing I love about fall, is the ability to layer, and nothing layers better than a beautiful vest. This one by Patagonia is my absolute favorite. It styles so well and I even pair it with workout clothes or scrubs when I'm working. I purchased mine last season, but this one is definitely a Patagonia staple. Just make sure to size down a size.
I am whole-heartedly OBSESSED with this bag. I think it is the perfect bag for fall, but is one that can easily transition through winter to next spring. It is so cute and the leather on this is to die for…like butta people.
Every home needs a good smelling candle during fall because it is the epitome of coziness. The Fireside candle from Anthropology is one of my favorites because it embodies the smell of small so perfectly. Every season they design it a little differently and every season I can't wait to get my hands on at least two of them!
I love a cute pullover that I can throw on easily over my outfit and take anywhere with me. This one from Jcrew Factory is perfect! It comes in 10 different colors, is under $40, and is super lightweight, soft, and flattering on every body type. I have already bought it in two colors, but I may need to add another!
I decided to add a necklace to the mix because I think Jcrew does a really great job with creating beautiful pieces that go fabulously with my favorite fall styles. This necklace comes in three different colors and would look perfect paired with every singe piece I have posted above.
I think that is all I have for now. I wanted to sort of cover every area for you guys, so hopefully you enjoy. If you like this post, feel free to comment below to give me your feedback so I can provide more of what you like in the future!
Also, it is still not too late to grab the book for this months book club! It is called To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han. It is SO good and we will be reviewing it LIVE on Instagram this Sunday October 1, 5:30 pm Pacific Time. Hope to see you all there!


text:
2013 William Hill Grand Slam of Darts Schedule
REIGNING William Hill Grand Slam of Darts champion Raymond van Barneveld will take on shooting star Ricky Evans in the opening session of the £400,000 tournament on Saturday November 9 as the nine-day event begins in Wolverhampton. Dutch legend van Barneveld heads Group E for the round-robin stage of the Sky Sports-televised event, which sees the 32 players split into eight groups of four players, with the top two from each group progressing to the knockout stage from the second round onwards
Saturday November 9 Afternoon Session (1pm-5pm) Groups E-H First Games Robert Thornton v Mark Walsh (F) Andy Hamilton v Justin Pipe (F) Scott Waites v Ted Hankey (H) Dave Chisnall v Michael Smith (H) Wes Newton v Mark Webster (G) Simon Whitlock v Ross Smith (G) Mervyn King v Tony O'Shea (E) Raymond van Barneveld v Ricky Evans (E)
Evening Session (7pm-11pm) Gary Anderson v Wesley Harms (B) James Wade v Peter Wright (B) Christian Kist v Ronny Huybrechts (C) Adrian Lewis v Richie George (C) Kevin Painter v Paul Nicholson (A) Phil Taylor v Stuart Kellett (A) Michael van Gerwen v Vincent van der Voort (D) Kim Huybrechts v Dean Winstanley (D)
Sunday November 10 Afternoon Session (1.30pm-5.30pm) Groups E-H Second Games Saturday's winning players meet each other, and Saturday's losing players meet each other.
Evening Session (7pm-11pm) Groups A-D Second Games Saturday's winning players meet each other, and Saturday's losing players meet each other.
Monday November 11 (7pm-11pm) Groups E-H Final Games
Tuesday November 12 (7pm-11pm) Groups A-D Final Games
Wednesday November 13 (7pm-11pm) 4x Second Round Matches Winner Group E v Runner-Up Group F Winner Group F v Runner-Up Group E Winner Group G v Runner-Up Group H Winner Group H v Runner-Up Group G
Thursday November 14 (7pm-11pm) 4x Second Round Matches Winner Group A v Runner-Up Group B Winner Group B v Runner-Up Group A Winner Group C v Runner-Up Group D Winner Group D v Runner-Up Group C
Friday November 15 (7pm-11pm) 2x Quarter-Finals
Saturday November 16 (7pm-11pm) 2x Quarter-Finals
Sunday November 17 Afternoon Session (1pm-5pm) Semi-Finals
Evening Session (7pm-9pm) Final
Format Group Matches – Best of nine legs Second Round – Best of 19 legs Quarter-Finals – Best of 31 legs Semi-Finals – Best of 31 legs Final – Best of 31 legs
http://www.satandpcguy.com/Site/live_darts_on_sky_sports_costa_blanca_spain.php
Posted by The Sat and PC Guy at 7:25 pm on November 8, 2013 Tagged with: darts, grand slam, grand slam of darts, players, schedule, sky sports


I've realized that there's a difference between my ability to feel, my ability to express my feelings, and my ability to let go. I know there are many painful emotions I learned to suppress when I was young, particularly anger or sadness. Other emotions might be difficult to feel because they are connected to past pain.
Yet there's no letting go, no moving on, until I stop trying to avoid feelings such as sorrow, anger, rage or despair. I have found the way to begin working through difficult feelings is to reach out to people with a phone call, email, blog comment or going to a meeting. Other ways I have found to help are writing (blogging or journaling), having a good cry, or plan a healing ritual which can be as simple as taking a couple of days alone, just to think. For some of us, turning to our Higher Power, as we know it provides the spiritual help and nourishment we need.
The release that will come as a result of expressing our feelings will help to ease the pain. It's not realistic to release all of the pain from our past all at once, but we can begin by letting go of a little piece today.


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MyARMOUR
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RAN: Educating young people is key
Education is the key to preventing youngsters and young adults from being attracted to violent extremist ideologies and organisations. Prevention in formal and informal education focuses on fostering active citizenship, democratic values, media literacy, critical thinking and cultural diversity, and on challenging stereotypes, discrimination and extremist attitudes and behaviour. It aims at building resilience and strengthening democratic citizenship by encouraging young people to actively engage with their social environments, institutions and society at large.
Prevention work in educational settings is not limited to targeting youngsters and young adults that are vulnerable to radicalisation; it also addresses teachers and their institutions to facilitate the participation of students and to enhance identification with society. In addition, it aims at raising awareness among educators for risk factors and providing adequate institutional responses. Preventative measures include the implementation of preventative approaches in teaching, the training of educators, the implementation of procedures to identify and manage potential cases of radicalisation, as well as the creation of institutional environments that encourage youngsters to engage and articulate their interests and perspectives.
RAN's approach on educating young people entails practices aimed at educating youth on citizenship, stereotypes, discrimination, extremism, democratic values and cultural diversity in order to strengthen their resistance to radicalisation. It also aims to address sensitive issues such as radicalisation and violent extremism within an educational setting.
More about the initiative can be found in RAN's 2019 Edition under the RAN Collection of Approaches and Practices series 'Educating young people'
A comprehensive list of best practices can be found online at RAN's 'Educating young people' collection.
Source: RAN
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This project was funded by the European Union's Internal Security Fund — Police.
A RADICAL MODEL OF RESILIENCE FOR YOUNG MINDS - ARMOUR
ISFP-2017-AG-RAD
Grant agreement No:
01/2019 - 06/2021 (30 months)
Co-ordinator:
Fundación Euroárabe de Altos Estudios (FUNDEA)
EU funding:
739,848.83 EUR
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