The Rhetoric of Love on Valentine’s Day
By: Scott Irving
Tags: Love, Valentines Day, Consumerism, Classics, Spirituality

The journey toward true love. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

This Valentine’s Day found me reading Plato’s Symposium for the umpteenth time. Actually, I spent the day surrounded by my books. That’s not unlike most days, except for the actual choice of books which walled around my desk. Why are you spending Valentine’s Day reading? a friend just asked. Well, I harbour grave misgivings about Valentine’s Day. It seems like an excuse to sell cards and hoodwink gullible women under the cover of a hypocritical sentimentalism. It doesn’t seem like any of it is really done for love.

It might actually be my least favourite ‘traditional’ holiday. I find it difficult to do anything more than half-hearted in the name of St Hallmark, but even so I participate in good faith, as best I can. I try to be a good sport. In any case, the closest I can get to participating in all the love-talk in good conscience is gorging myself on talk about love in a more engaged and probing way than the card companies encourage— in other words, the closest I can get is reading about love, to mark the occasion. Despite my misgivings, I really was looking for a good enough reason to celebrate. Whatever I may be, I’m not a contrarian for contrarianism’s sake.

So, that’s why yesterday afternoon, my copies of Plato and Marsilio Ficino rubbed shoulders with Ovid, Tibullus and Catullus; and even, by tangential relation, with Lucretius. Nor should I forget Shakespeare. I was reading what the important thinkers — and feelers — of the canon had to say about love.

Given the preponderance of ancient authors, this seems to imply that I think the Ancients have better things to say about the subject than the Moderns. For the most part, that implication is correct. Only in discussions of chivalry can we say for sure that the Moderns come out ahead, and that’s only because chivalry isn’t really ‘a thing’ until the Middle Ages. Such a notion as chivalry would have caused genuine puzzlement, even amusement, to the Ancients. In Latin elegiac verse in particular, love often seems more of a diversion than a devotion, a pastime appropriate for an idle young literary man of the leisure class. Nevertheless, in Love-as-Eros, we can barely touch them.

I’m more sympathetic to ‘their’ view than to ‘ours’.

Let me be clear: Valentine’s Day is an aberration. We can’t even say with confidence why we really celebrate it, let alone establish its origins to our satisfaction. The only reason it’s still popular is because it’s Good Business.

Now — back to books.

Finding the Rhetoric of Love

I singled out Plato’s Symposium because it’s an acknowledged starting-point in the Western canon. It’s a work ostensibly about the nature of love plain and simple. There’s much more to it than that, of course, as the speech by Socrates and the conclusion of the dialogue shows. Actually, although interpreters of Plato tend to focus on this speech and what comes after it, we see signs of the subtext long before this, going all the way to the start of the action.

The Symposium is an invitation to enjoyment of an elevated kind. I’m actually not a big fan of re-reading Plato’s dialogues, although he had a talent for staging philosophical discussions which have inflected Western thought with a genre of rational dialogues unknown outside of our civilisation. Even amid such a prestigious corpus, the Symposium stands out from the rest.

It’s a speaking contest, belonging to the realm of rhetoric. Now, while Logic as we know it today proceeds by means of successive operations, like mathematics, Rhetoric proceeds by means of continuous performance. Despite the unkind treatment Plato gives to the art of rhetoric in Gorgias, the Sophist and elsewhere — including even the Symposium itself — he partakes of the rhetorician’s craft.

This might seem strange from a strict Platonist’s perspective, but it’s entirely in-keeping with the tradition of European love literature. Dante found love to be the proper attitude towards the gentilissima donna (‘most gentle lady’) Philosophy and rhetoric to be the proper means of its cultivation. Among the first generation of humanists, along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, Dante’s interest in philosophy was first awakened by literary love. This is a fairly uncontroversial attitude in pre-modern literature.

Love literature always has multiple layers and readings, of which Ovid’s love elegies are only the most famous example. These works are really about something else, without ceasing to be about love. This something else is so important, despite often going unuttered, that it’s what makes reading these works an experience. It can best be identified, at this point, as expression. Of course, love and expression go hand-in-hand, so like I said, this doesn’t mean such works cease to be about love, as we’ll see below.

The Symposium in a Sprint

Plato’s Symposium is an example of this literature, albeit an unusual one. It’s also unusual for a Platonic dialogue. In this case, the immediate difference is that Plato is more flexible than usual with his chosen format. This, and other details, change how we experience the text. The Symposium a Platonic dialogue that actually involves less dialogue as such than it does showy speechifying. It’s framed as a story told third-hand by Apollodorus, set during the second day of a two-or-three-day bender on the vino, and we immediately find the drunken revellers — most notably Socrates, also — bored and somewhere between residually drunk and actively hungover. The party is hosted at the villa of the tragic poet Agathon, who is celebrating his victory in the tragedy competition the previous night.

Amor and Psyche (1589) by Florentine painter Jacopo Zucchi. (Image in the public domain)

Being ancient Greek men, the attendees make the unanimous choice to enjoy themselves with that favourite Hellenic pastime of conversation. Since heads are too sore for ornate political dialogue, they decide to shake the cobwebs loose with something a little more easygoing. So, naturally, they decide to engage in a light-hearted oratorical competition, much like that won by Agathon before the dialogue’s action starts. The main difference in this case is the intimacy of the company and environment, the fact that the contest is celebratory and private. It might help the modern reader to think of it as their version of inviting the boys over to ‘get lit AF’ and play Super Smash Bros. In any case, they decide to take turns giving speeches in praise of Eros or love, with Dionysus, the god of wine, to judge the winner (which turns out to be effected via his proxy, the outrageously drunken Alcibiades). Each participant, even Socrates, seizes upon the opportunity to excel in showmanship. Plato coyly conceals the fact that the work is as much about the speeches given as about love itself.

“Love sounds suspiciously like rhetoric”

After reading the succession of speeches, culminating in that by Socrates, we’re compelled to draw one over-arching conclusion about love. Love is that mediating force which spurs us towards all the qualities celebrated by the previous speakers: in no particular order, philandering, pederasty, romance, self-sacrifice, civic virtue, truth and Beauty. The higher conception of Love ( — I’ll switch to rendering it with a capital-L now — ) brings us to the ultimate goods via their earthly representations. We may join Alcibiades, the assembled speakers and Plato himself in according Socrates undisputed victory, the crowning achievement of the night’s revels, but we needn’t discard the rest. The Symposium is best read as an unfolding process, which yields overall a rose-like rhetoric of love, of which the night’s perspectives are some of the many petals. They each carry the fragrance of something genuine to some extent or other. In the Symposium, as a matter of fact, love sounds suspiciously like rhetoric in the best sense of the word.

Seeing the light of reality on the other side of the apparent is the major aim of Platonic philosophy. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

The work also convinces us to conceive of Love as having a chiefly vertical character, whose whispered intimations encourage us onward and upward. This way of describing it is to establish contradistinction from the horizontal, which we might describe as drifting unwittingly from one indulgence to another on the same level. Instead, the way to Love is a promising mountain path along which we may steadily ascend to the highest delights of the soul. What’s to be condemned in such a concept?

A Dialogue with the Hallmark Casanovas

I n the present day, we’ve certainly lost the thread on this conception of love. Once a year, on St Valentine’s feast day, this becomes painfully obvious. I repeat for emphasis, Saint Valentine’s Day — an indication of the formerly sacred character of love.

In fact, the contemporary ‘celebration’ of Valentine’s Day contributes to the misunderstanding. It feels more like an unfunny version of the Feast of Fools, as do most other holidays these days. The rampant commercialism of this Hallmark holiday possibly even marks a rung below the lower, carnal level of Eros which Pausanias mentions only to condemn. The paths to love we’re sold with greetings cards, Lindt chocolates, scentless roses and flavoured condoms lead us only deeper into a labyrinth of lies.

Valentine’s Day has always struck me as off-the-rack romance rechauffé year upon year. Now, of course, this is incredibly convenient for me. I’m truly terrible at Valentine’s Day in the presently accepted form, as a wife and a string of former girlfriends can readily attest. I have exactly one ex who could get me to consistently celebrate Valentine’s Day as anything resembling a holiday, including the giving-theoretically-romantic-gifts rigmarole, and all that was because she had an impish way of making it fun and mysterious, with various surprises and gift boxes scattered throughout the day. Barring some miraculous change in the future, I regard this as a fluke.

Whatever Valentine’s Day may be, it’s not inherently loving. It’s display, neediness, avarice and platitudes, none of which requires love.

Even in an evolutionary sense, according to the handicap hypothesis, this romantic credulity is deleterious. In signalling theory, signals which have a fitness cost for the bearer get around the possibility of bluffing and therefore accurately signal desirability to potential mates. What handicap signalling eliminates, to a large extent, is the possibility that we’re deceived into bad matches by desirable traits which can be faked. The whole repertoire of Valentine’s Day, by contrast, is nothing but a set of such bluffs. Indeed, the holiday is a shameless celebration of deceptive signalling.

Valentine’s is the consumerism equivalent of gut-sucking.

Again, none of this proves or requires the involvement of love. The only thing close to love which is demonstrably involved is the love-of-money, which is a kind of love in name only. Actually, Valentine’s Day is a surreptitious encouragement to all of the Seven Deadly Sins to some degree or another.

The Valentine’s swindle has all the downsides of our hyper-commercialised Coca-Cola Christmas, without any of the midwinter rituals or the binding power of family which ground the latter. Instead, it’s little more than nigh-bare lust feigning modesty and devotion behind the fig-leaf of fraud. Its female role models range from the treacherous Delilah and brazen Jezebel to the vengeful Medea; its male ones variations of the vile blackmailer Scarpia from Sadou’s La Tosca (later adapted to opera by Puccini).

Valentine’s Day belongs to homo economicus, not homo rhetoricus, to our detriment. It’s the celebration of commerce, not Cupid.

“Going ahead means recovering what we left behind”

I don’t pretend to fully understand the innermost esoterica of Love, but to riff on Socrates himself, at least I know that we know nothing of it, if Valentine’s Day is any indication; I can’t tell you exactly what it is that we lost, but we’ve lost something. Now, something comparably wonderful might even lie ahead, but I don’t think we’ll find it by disregarding inherited wisdom. I’d rather find new treasure by the old byways and folkways than leave it to dumb luck. Going ahead means recovering what we left behind.

We’re thinking without a bannister, as Hannah Arendt put it; proceeding in ignorance, without the benefit of a living tradition of thought to suggest how we might correctly understand love. Moreover, we’re loving without a bannister. Rhetoric has given way to lifeless marketing. There’s no longer any via dolce to discipline the heart and mind of the lover. The art of proper speaking, which once showed hidden connections and paths, which enticed the minds of our ancestors out of the gutter, has given way to the science of the gutter itself.

Grasping Ariadne’s Thread

So, yes, while I’m terrible at Valentine’s Day, I don’t want to be good at it, not secretly, not even a tiny bit. Rather, I want to get better at expressing to those I love the higher reality of that love and, in the process of expressing it, finding it myself.

When we reveal the light of our love, we articulate the deepest truths of our own souls, our inner music. When we each play our inner music with another, we may find its harmony in theirs — that is, genuine and meaningful connection. All stable and enduring meanings come from connections anyway, both in linguistics and in our own lives. Connections between differentiated phenomena, inflected by their particularity, illuminate relationships which our forebears called magic; even more so connections between people. It’s from sensing these connections that we get the literary sensibility best stated by the Roman dramatist Terence, who avers that

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

or

I am a human being, so, I think, nothing human is alien to me

We reach out to make these connections, we conjecture out beyond ourselves. This is personally meaningful to me. It’s why I write. My goal in literary composition is not simply to speak or write in vacuo, but to communicate and connect.

It’s connection — our participation in the Love that moves through all — that makes it all worthwhile, that makes the world spin. This is in many ways the central message of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he expressed when he wrote

l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

or

It’s love that moves the Sun and the other stars

and he was right. Love is the heat which makes the fire burn and the light which makes the brilliance shine. It’s the Alchemist’s One-in-All, suggested by the symbol ☉ for the Sun.

Finding the thread woven rhetorically can lead us back to such forgotten truths, back to magic. Figurative language conveys us dreamily into the realm of Love. It must be so, as loving is one of the most problematic verbs, despite being self-evident. In this sense, Eros belongs to the realm of Nous, that which we know because we know it. We know it by experiencing it, living within it.

This doesn’t take us into the realm of the irrational, but it does go beyond the strictly rational. Reason can’t discover its first principles, since it operates by derivation, while first principles are underived. It must derive from something pre-established, pre-agreed. This means that the rational must come after the pre-rational.

“Finding the thread woven rhetorically can lead us back to magic”

Love belongs to the realm of first principles, to transcendence. In its primordial form, this speaks to us as purely intuitive poetry, with a number of its tropes going back as far as original (proto-)Indo-European verse, suggested by poetical-rhetorical features common across Indo-European languages: for example, Love’s arrow is a rhetorical image known not only in Western European languages, as in the mythology of Cupid, but as far East and as far back as in ancient Vedic scripture. Poetry speaks to nous from nous, in immediate concepts rather than derived ones. Figurative language and vivid imagery is the means to convey such meanings into our visible world and, in turn, to convey us into their invisible world. Once developed, this common body of figurative language gives us the clear art of rhetoric as well.

The discovery of metaphor, the power to move from one meaning to another in a single word and to fix figurative meanings in the minds of one’s audience, is the beginning of poetry and the precursor to rhetoric. For the same reason, it also leads to love-language.

Finding Love

The way back to Love, I think, is through reclaiming the rhetoric of love, its poetry and its narratives. We enrich our own story by reintegrating, within it, Love’s story. Rhetoric is the art which best reveals Love, because Love is the divine motion through which we attract and are attracted, while rhetoric moves us and impresses upon us similar feelings, illuminating what is attractive.

So, while I may not find the final answer I’m looking for in Plato’s Symposium, the Latin poets, Dante’s La Vita Nuova, or Ficino’s De Amore, I’m at least confident that I’ll find something more beneficial to myself. I also do my small bit to starve Mammon on one of his annual feasts. At last, I think I’ve found the thread to lead me out of this labyrinth. Instead of wasting my efforts on decadent display, I consecrate myself to finding something transcendent.

That much, at least, I can do in the name of Love.