Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] Of course, I’m going to say either Socrates or Alcibiades. I like Aristophanes’s speech, too. It’s beautiful, but Socrates’s speech affects me the most intellectually. When I read it, it’s one of the places that I go to for understanding the Theory of the Forms and what it would be like for one to work one’s way up to a Form, something like that. It’s a short, concentrated bit of text that addresses that issue, so that’s really great. But Alcibiades’ speech is more moving to me, and it’s one of the places that I would go to in the corpus for trying to understand what it’s like to meet someone like Socrates, and for him to be in the world with you. To be one of the people in the world that’s around Socrates. Alcibiades’s speech is the best place for that. Those would be my two favorites, for different reasons. Let me give you part of my take on Symposium, and then you give me your interpretation, or a better interpretation. I think of the dialogue — much of it is being about people actually aren’t that interested in Eros. If you think about Alcibiades, so much of his speech is putting down of Socrates, and keeping him at a length, and saying, “Well, you’re not so great. You’re not as modest as you appear to be.” Most of the speeches have these long digressions from the topic of love. Most of the speeches, as pure logic, I don’t find very impressive. I think the dialogue as a whole is extraordinarily impressive, but it’s through the failings of the speeches. And it’s striking that at the end that what people really just want to do — what Danny Kahneman told me once — is sit around talking to their friends, and they want to get drunk. So self-intoxication is in some ways a more fundamental concept than Eros, and there’s a complacency. Even at the beginning, people are getting drunk, and the speech of Alcibiades — he’s talking about alcohol early on, multiple times. The one person who really focuses on love and gives you a compelling vision is Aristophanes. He exactly is the dramatist. He does false things. His account of being split from your other half and then reunited is obviously false, but completely wonderful and brilliant and beautiful. So we have this myth of love and Eros, which is at the center of society. But it’s actually something we pretend we are much more interested in than what we really care about, and that’s talking with our friends, our petty rivalries, getting drunk, and just sitting around. What’s your take? One bit of textual evidence against at least a part of that is that they decide not to drink, that is they . . .…

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