jdact
Hands Up and Down. Eros and Normative Scrutiny
«An older man stands close to a younger man, who looks
up (or, as the case may be, down) at him, often with fond affection. The older
man beams beneficently at the young man’s beardless face, and with one hand he
cups the younger man’s chin, in a gesture expressive of tender personal
affection. His other hand, however, has other ideas: it fondles the young man’s
genitals, which are usually exposed. The older man’s penis is often erect, the
younger man’s almost never. The young man sometimes repels the groping hand,
but often, too, contentedly allows it. In this highly conventional and popular
ancient Greek image of sexual courtship, named by John Beazley the up and down position and found on dozens
of vases from the classical period, we see a tension in the Greek concept of eros. To investigate that tension, and
the Stoic philosophers’ response to it, is my purpose. On the one hand, eros is beneficent, showing a tender
regard for the young man’s personality and his education; on the other hand, it
is, characterized by strong genital desire, which has the potential for
ferocity and blind indifference to the wellbeing of the beloved. Does the left hand know what the right
hand is doing? Or the right
the left? The vase images, like some literary text that I shall later
examine, frequently intimate that the two aspects of eros work harmoniously together: the hand that strokes the genitals
is just as precise and reverent, just as cautious, as the hand that delicately
cups the face. But the Greeks know well that things are not always so. A statue
from 470 B.C., the first plate in Dover's Greek
Homosexuality, shows a Zeus of massive physique carrying off young Ganymede
in one squeezing arm, without even a glance at the face; while Zeus strides
victoriously ahead, the young man looks down in what seems to be helpless
confusion. As the chorus in sophocles’ Antigone observes, addressing Eros, You take the minds of the just and turn them
aside to injustice. Even the gods are not exempt from this madness. Greek
popular morality contained in this way two ideas about eros that proved notoriously difficult to reconcile. On the one
hand, eros is seen as a divine gift,
connected with illumination and delight for the lover and with generous
educative intentions toward the beloved. On the other hand, eros is a source of madness and
distraction, a force that disrupts reasoning and threatens virtue, but if it
threatens virtue, it also seems to threaten, inevitably, the good conduct of
the lover toward his partner. Nor can we even cleanly separate these two
tendencies in eros, for it would
appear (according, again, to deeply entrenched popular ideas) that the very madness
and distraction in the lover that put virtue at risk are among the sources of
his generosity to the beloved. The very passion that threatens virtue may also
motivate virtuous actions». In Martha C. Nussbaum e Juha Sihvola, The
Sleep of Reason, Eros and Ethical Norms. Philosophers Respond to a Cultural
Dilemma, Martha C. Nussbaum, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and
London, USA, 2002, ISBN 0-226-60915-4.
Cortesia
de UChicago/JDACT