What now about love?
“All you need is love”? “Make love not war”?
These slogans were made famous by the radical counter-culture movement in the US in the early 1960’s and were to go viral in the year 1968 when the intellectual, social and political contestation gained the whole world. Love was put in the forefront of the claims to change life. At the time, the people felt the extreme political and existential importance of love, making clear that the things of love were repressed under moral and social pressure.
Way before that, at the dawn of western civilization, over 25 centuries ago, love appeared as a brand-new subject, closely linked to the emergence of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Plato’s Symposium gives testimony of this. In order to convince the other banqueters to choose “love” as their main topic for conversation, Eryximachus put forward the fact that “no one ever down to the present day has ventured worthily to hymn Eros”, and that it was about time to “adorn the god”.
Well, now, fifty years after the year 1968, and despite the fantastic literature on the topic, there might be reasons to think, as Eryximachus, that Love is still neglected and ill-known. Today Love seems everywhere and nowhere – and therefore perhaps even more difficult to talk about, to philosophize about than in Plato’s time when it was obvious that Love was a God, that his name was Eros, and that this God was all powerful. But, then, have we been celebrating Love all too much and for too long?
A prologue personified by an artist will introduce this love symposion at the end of the 2018 Night of Philosophy & Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, presenting seven philosophers around a table. A table set in the middle of the public space, and musicians around, at the end of a night, banqueters hesitating between wine and coffee and croissants. Visions and speeches on love when dawn is in its way, perhaps proving again what Socrates claimed 25 centuries earlier in Plato’s Symposium: that a philosopher “know[s] nothing except the things of love”. And the audience will test it, experimenting how the philosopher’s seduction, the seductions of his words, can be challenged by the seduction of music and conversely how the philosopher’s seduction can challenge the seduction of music.
With the philosophers Chiara Bottici, Skye Cleary, Simon Critchley, Samantha Hill, Massimo Pigliucci, Susanna Schellenberg, Rossen Ventzislavov, the artist Gabrielle Meyerowitz and the oud player Mavrothi T. Kontanis.
Symposion is a series of performances for seven or height philosophers, one artist and traditional Greek musicians conceived by Mériam Korichi. The performance at the BPL will be the second production of this special format created in Mykonos, September 5, 2017, a new offspring of the series of events A Night of Philosophy.