Thomas Jefferson loathed Plato. In 1814, he wrote to John Adams that he had been reading the Republic and came away unimpressed: “Bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities, & incomprehensibilities, and what remains?” The only reason the Greek philosopher is so revered, Jefferson opined, is that “education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato.”
Even so, Jefferson would have been appalled by what happened last week at Texas A&M University. Days before the spring semester began, Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor, was ordered to remove Plato’s Symposium from the list of assigned readings for the class “Contemporary Moral Issues.” Peterson and Plato fell victim to a policy adopted by the university in the fall, which states that classes cannot “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without special approval.
In his email response to his department chair, Inside Higher Ed reported, Peterson warned, “You are making Texas A&M famous—but not for the right reasons.” He was right. The case has attracted widespread outrage, including a protest from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It’s hard to imagine a starker violation of academic freedom than forbidding students to read one of the most famous texts in all of Western philosophy. “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,” Peterson protested.
[Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction]
But although this kind of censorship may be absurd and sinister, it is ironically fitting that Plato, of all philosophers, should be targeted by a regime worried about the effect of subversive ideas on tender minds. Almost 2,500 years ago, Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was sentenced to death by the city of Athens for exactly the same reason.
“What do they say? Something of this sort: That Socrates is a doer of evil, and corrupter of the youth, and he does not believe in the gods of the state.” That is how the charges against him are described in the Apology, one of Plato’s early works, which reports or imagines the speech Socrates delivered in his defense at his trial. He warns his fellow citizens about “the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man.”
The fate of Socrates convinced Plato that the conflict between philosophy and society was inevitable—especially in a democracy, where public opinion is sacred. In the parable of the cave, in the Republic, Plato compares human beings to cave dwellers who never see the sun, but perceive everything by shadowy firelight. Only the philosopher is able to escape the cave and see the way things really are. But when he returns to share what he’s discovered, and tries to get the others to leave the cave too, they laugh at him, or worse: “If they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?” Socrates asks. “No doubt about it,” replies his conversation partner, Glaucon (who in real life was Plato’s older brother).
The Enlightenment began to challenge this pessimistic view in the 18th century. Jefferson was naturally hostile to Plato’s elitism: If all men are created equal, as the Declaration of Independence said, then everyone should be able to understand the truth, once the weight of authority and tradition is lifted from their shoulders.
In the 20th century, the idea that democracy and freedom of thought went hand in hand began to seem doubtful. Leo Strauss, one of Plato’s most important modern interpreters, was a refugee from Nazi Germany, where the banning and burning of subversive books was extremely popular, especially with college students. The idea that seeking the truth was dangerous, that being a philosopher meant courting popular fury, no longer sounded so antique.
In his 1964 book, The City and Man, Strauss wrote that, for Plato, cities are “assemblies of madmen which corrupt most of those fit to become philosophers, and to which those who have succeeded against all odds in becoming philosophers rightly turn their backs in disgust.” This enmity has existed in most times and places, requiring philosophers to exercise what Strauss called “prudence”—that is, to protect themselves by concealing their most explosively unconventional ideas. Strauss believed that many great philosophers had employed “esoteric writing,” only hinting at their true teachings in their published work, to avoid angering the powers that be.
For most of history, the really dangerous philosophical ideas were those that touched on religion and political power. But the Platonic text censored at Texas A&M is not about these subjects, at least not directly. Rather, the Symposium deals with sex and love. Peterson intended to assign the passage in which Plato elaborates on a myth about the origin of erotic love, proposing that human beings were originally created as bodies joined together. Some of these pairs included two men, some two women, and some a man and a woman. But Zeus cut these doubles in half, and ever since our souls have longed to reunite with their lost mate.
This explains why some people are what we now call homosexual: Their souls were originally part of a same-sex pair. Plato writes that if Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, appeared to a male couple and offered “to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live, live a common life as if you were a single man,” the lovers would certainly agree: “This meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.”
The Symposium’s sympathetic depiction of same-sex desire—at least between men; no female characters take part in the discussion—has long made Plato what we’d now call “queer-coded.” The Victorian writer John Addington Symonds spoke for many a gay reader when he described the thrill of reading Plato for the first time: “Here in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, I discovered the true Liber Amoris [Book of Love] at last, the revelation I had been waiting for.”
Yet the Symposium insists that erotic desire is not really about sex. What we yearn for is not this or that beautiful body, but the beautiful itself, an ideal that can be found only in the spiritual realm. Plato suggests that this is especially true of love between men, which transcends biology because it doesn’t lead to procreation. Symonds said he found in the Symposium “the consecration of a long-cherished idealism.”
[Aziz Huq: The next era of the American university]
It’s highly unlikely that the Texas A&M regents read Plato before drafting their policy. If they had, they would have discovered that, far from “advocating gender ideology,” he challenges all of our 21st-century ways of thinking about sex and gender. He is neither “left” nor “right,” because he lived thousands of years before those labels were invented. That is one of the reasons studying Greek philosophy has never become obsolete: In every generation, it allows people to escape the binaries of their own time and think things through from the beginning.
The belief that every student is capable of this kind of thinking, and deserves to experience it, was one of the noblest ideals of democratic education. Now that both democracy and education are under threat in the United States, philosophers may have to relearn the “prudence” that once seemed like a relic of history. Peterson is already employing a classic technique of esoteric writing: calling attention to what he is forced to omit. In his revised syllabus, when the students were originally supposed to read Plato, they will now be assigned a New York Times article about why they can’t.
