Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas

Author:Julia Annas
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2003-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Sex and gender

Until the 20th century, while Plato has often been prominent in the Western philosophical tradition, his views on sex, love, and gender have been, for different reasons, regarded as off-limits to philosophical discussion, and this has resulted in a curious willed blindness to what is in the texts. Though not invented then, the hypocrisy involved was particularly apparent in the 19th century, when Plato’s works became prominent in university education.

* * *

Victorian evasion of the homoerotic element in Plato

Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love captures the ambivalence of Victorian Oxford’s attitude to Plato. Here we meet Walter Pater, a repressed homosexual whose book Plato and Platonism brought some aspects of Plato’s love of male beauty almost to the surface, and Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College, who translated Plato into English and pioneered the study of Plato, particularly the Republic, at Oxford. In Stoppard’s play Jowett charges Pater with writing inappropriately fervid letters to a Balliol student.

PATER: … I am astonished that you should take exception to an obviously Platonic enthusiasm.

JOWETT: A Platonic enthusiasm as far as Plato was concerned meant an enthusiasm of the kind that would empty the public schools and fill the prisons where it is not nipped in the bud. In my translation of the Phaedrus it required all my ingenuity to rephrase his description of paederastia into the affectionate regard as exists between an Englishman and his wife. Plato would have made the transposition himself if he had had the good fortune to be a Balliol man.

PATER: And yet, Master, no amount of ingenuity can dispose of boy-love as the distinguishing feature of a society which we venerate as one of the most brilliant in the history of human culture, raised far above its neighbours in moral and mental distinction.

JOWETT: You are very kind but one undergraduate is hardly a distinguishing feature, and I have written to his father to remove him. … The canker that brought low the glory that was Greece shall not prevail over Balliol!

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.