The Wednesday Society
A podcast that takes a philosophical deep dive into forgotten or intentionally neglected texts.
The Wednesday Society
06 | On Beauty | The Final Step: Beauty and the Erotic
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The final step on Diotima’s ladder is the most enigmatic. Diotima says that we encounter the beautiful “in itself,” without any form or shape. This seems impossible, given that beauty is something we sense - or at least discern in some particular person or thing…
Dalia Nassar and Simon Tedeschi think about this enigma in light of Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic.” Can Lorde’s notion of the “erotic” - as presence, attentiveness, and playfulness - help us to understand what it means to experience the beautiful immediately? And what exactly would this experience be like?
The Wednesday Society is hosted by Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. In this first season, Dalia discusses beauty in its many forms with concert pianist and writer, Simon Tedeschi.
- Producer: Sarah Allely
- Composer: Russell Stapleton
- Sound engineer: Bethany Stewart
Email us: wednesdaysocietypodcast@gmail.com
This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council, recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and supported by the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Dharug country.
Hello and welcome to the Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites you to slow down, think, and discover. And we do this by discussing philosophical and literary texts that aren't all that well known. Maybe they've been forgotten or intentionally neglected. I'm Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. This is the final episode of our first season on beauty. Thank you for coming this far on our journey up Daytima's Ladder. Over the season, we've explored beauty from different angles. So philosophy isn't easy, but the more you immerse yourself in it, the easier it gets and the more rewarding. This episode is perhaps particularly challenging. We discuss a lot of different ideas, and we've also arrived at the final step of Diatima's ladder. It's a crucial moment, and it's also a mysterious moment. To help us understand this final step, we read Audrey Lorde's 1978 essay on the uses of the Erotic. One of the key ideas we've been thinking about over the season is Eros, which for the Greeks, including diotima, means love. But Eros is a specific kind of love, and maybe the best way to define it is as desire. Now, for diotima, the human being is fundamentally erotic. That means that at our core we're desiring beings. Christian philosophers, though, were keen to distinguish Eros from other forms of love, like agape, which is brotherly love, and filia, which is love for friends. And for Christianity, Eros came to mean specifically romantic love involving sexual relations. Lord goes back to the Greek meaning of Eros, and like Daityma, she sees the human being as a desiring being. And this means that desire is present not only in romantic relations, but also in relation to things like work, play, art, and ideas. As in the other episodes, I'm joined in this one by pianist and writer Simon Tedeski. So Simon and I really disagree here, and we disagree on an important question. To be honest, in retrospect, I'm not sure of the answer. I can see both perspectives. Hello, Simon.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Dahlia.
SPEAKER_01In this season, we have so far followed Diotima's steps one through four. We've discussed physical beauty, we've discussed beauty of form, we've discussed moral beauty and the relationship between beauty and politics. Now, Simon, we've reached the final step of Diotima's ladder. And so this is very exciting, but it's also very mysterious.
SPEAKER_00Indeed, Dahlia, it is mysterious because Diotima herself describes the final step as a direct encounter with the beautiful itself. The beautiful not appearing in any shape or form, but just as it is. And she says it's unchanging and eternal.
SPEAKER_01So this is really hard to understand, and I've literally spent years trying to understand what diatima means by encountering the beautiful in itself, unchanging and eternal. And honestly, I'm not sure that I fully get it, because when we think of beauty, we always think about it as appearing in some shape or form. A beautiful person, a beautiful object, or a beautiful artwork. So it's a great mystery that when uh we're supposed to achieve the highest knowledge, diotima's final step of the ladder, we're supposedly encountering the beautiful in and of itself. And so for years I did not understand what it meant. And then I came across Laura's essay. And I thought, huh. I think I think here is some way to understand what diotima means.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but Dahlia, what did what do you think it means then?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Okay, I'm not gonna say what I think because that would be too much of a spoiler, and I'm gonna put this back to you, Simon. What do you think the beautiful in itself means?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell I think beauty, like language and consciousness, rests on a paradox, and it's the paradox that you have just hinted upon. It is that beauty does exist for itself. It is autotelic. Um, it is uh it uh exists purely for itself. However, it can only be understood through form, which not only dilutes beauty, but it creates a kind of perimeter around beauty and therefore makes it not autotelic anymore. So it exists as a paradox. It has to be seen through a painting, through music, through form, and yet that is a kind of mediating device because the real beauty is untouchable.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm gonna push back on this because two reasons. First, you're sounding a lot like Vay. If we um the listener remembers we talked exactly about this autotelic aspect of beauty, that beauty is um something that has no purpose outside of itself. It is just there. We can't explain why it's justified. It's justified simply because it is there. It's beautiful, its own justification. So, okay, good. You're sounding a lot like Vay. I don't have a problem with that, Simon. But what I do think is I'm gonna push back on is the fact that for Diotima at least, she thinks that we can get to this direct experience of beauty, that it doesn't always have to come in some shape or form. So I guess what you're saying is we don't get to that final step.
SPEAKER_00I uh would certainly push back on your pushback. Um I would uh also gently push back even on the great diotima. Um as a as and you called me a practitioner of beauty, I perhaps wouldn't necessarily go that far. Um I'm always, as a pianist, attaining for the beauty that I can't achieve. So my very work is evidence of my claim. I play music that is better than it can ever be possibly performed. And uh Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bach, but others as well, w we cannot actually touch that beauty. Um as to whether it exists in some I mean, this is this touches on your field a lot, this great kind of realm of idealism and the absolute. As to whether it exists in a kind of knowable, almost uh neoplatonic form, I don't know. Um but uh I know that with art in particular, which I would argue, and I hope you agree, is in many respects the most beautiful and palpable version of beauty. Um it is finite, it is expressed through form. And even with, say, the hammer clavier sonata, which is one of the greatest pieces, it is the form of the hammer clavier, hammer clavier sonata. And uh that's a great sonata by Beethoven. And yet there's always something more, there's always something deeper. What is that thing? I don't know. So in this sense, I agree uh with Vay. Music is uh is um in many respects, um it eliminates uh this signifier and signified what the original, you know, the the meaning is versus the way it's uh so in a in a sense I'm also contradicting myself because music also is the closest we have to doing away with form altogether.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Okay. This is super interesting, Simon, because we're already getting into the discussion, the meat of the discussion, the flesh of the discussion about what is this uh this beautiful, this direct encounter with beauty. And I love the fact that you bring up the the as a practitioner of music, of beauty, you probably do have these direct encounters with beauty in a way that a lot of us don't, right? Because you are always in this world of beauty, in this world of music. And maybe you're right that music has this most direct access to beauty. But what struck me about what you're saying, and I want to get back to Lord because we're getting ahead of ourselves, but what struck me about what you're saying is that as as well as any piece of music can be performed, there's always more to it. And no performance is going to fully do it justice, exhaust it. So there's as a performer, as a practitioner of beauty, you're always aware of there's more. And maybe that more over there, if I may, is hinting at what Dietima's talking about.
SPEAKER_00Perhaps. And I even qualify what I said even further. Sometimes people will talk about, say, a Bach piece or the Hammer Clavier sonata, and that itself is different from a performance of that piece. And I mean, we could even say this goes into the realms of philosophy of language, which is far beyond me. Um but uh this idea that that the Goldberg variations sits there in this sort of perfect, impermeable, permanent state is one that intrigues me, and I don't fully understand it. But uh with uh Audrey Lord, who is such a wonderful writer, returning to Lord, the fact that she writes in in the English language, you could already argue is uh constraining the ideas of uh, you know, immortal beauty and what cannot be expressed in a cognizant form. And that already is a dilution, but also a mediation of beauty. Perhaps the same as Deotima. The essay we're reading today, Uses of the Erotic, is quite short, but Lorde does a lot.
SPEAKER_01Tell me about it. There are so many compelling ideas here. So it's hard to know where to start, but I want to suggest that a good place to start is just by identifying what Lorde means by the erotic and how she distinguishes the erotic from the pornographic, because the two are often equated. So I want to start by just reading a passage where she defines what she means by the erotic. She says, this is Lord. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects. Born of Eros and personifying creative power and harmony. So we have a first idea of what she thinks of as the erotic. She's clearly connecting it back to Eros, to that discussion in the symposium about yearning, desire in all of its aspects, not just a sexual one. And then she identifies it with creative power. What do you make of that, Simon?
SPEAKER_00I think seen in its historical context, it's a radical but not a surprising position, considering where she was, why she was writing it, what was happening in the 1970s, what had been done to women and to a degree still is being done for centuries. And Lord, as a brilliant but marginalized woman, wanted to reclaim erotic not simply as sex, not even as body, but as um as power, as a psychological fundament underlining everything. I think that that's uh incredibly exciting, but not surprising when you consider what else was happening in the world in the 70s and the sixties with the sex revolution, um with race, with uh reconceptualization of everything that had happened after World War I and World War II.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Right. So one of the things that she really emphasizes is that the erotic has been, she says, vilified. It has been degraded, and it has been degraded and vilified, abused and devalued in Western society. And she describes it as a power, as a source, even a resource. And again, this is like these echoes with Eros in ancient Greek because he's the son of resourcefulness. So it's a resource, and he has this power, this capacity. And the question is, what kind of power is it? And how does it connect to creativity? Because for me at least, this is the source of why Lord can help us understand that mysterious final step and diatima's ladder. It's this idea that the erotic opens up for us the capacity for creativity.
SPEAKER_00And yet, in the West we've never been so repressed, so uncomfortable with things like death, with sex, with intimacy. And I think Lord, in many ways, touches um on this uh this profound paradox and schism at the heart of Western culture. Though I personally think that that schism at the heart of Western culture is somewhat due to the kind of uh philosophy introduced by Diotima. That's the paradox of it. Not just Diotima, but the symposium in which sex is here and um or rather, love is here, and it can be split into the vulgar, and then it can be split into something that is just so uh universal and so almost pious and virtuous. And I think in a sense you can say, well, Lord is sort of saying the same thing in the in the modern dress, but I also think that uh it's dangerous because with that came so much devaluing of women's sexuality. Um and so in that sense I'm I'm I'm much more um inclined, though not wholly, um, to be influenced by Camille Pallier, who writing at the same time as Lord said that uh the erotic is not something that can be domesticated. The erotic is not something that is uh um that is polite. The erotic n the erotic is something that is dangerous, that is sometimes violent, um, that is that is a dark fundament underneath everything. It's like the Hammerclavia sonata. It's not just beautiful, but it's also ugly. But it's it's the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and they this conflict between them is uh integral.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So okay, I think that it's I'm gonna say a couple of things in response to this, because first of all, you said it's super relevant for us in 2026. Absolutely agree there, and in particular because of the problem of pornography. So I want to come back to pornography, but I mean, we're sitting here in Australia, and I was looking at statistics at the statistics in Australia, and some of them are the most stunning things. Like this was from the government uh website. I just looked it up, and and they say 99% of men have seen some pornography by the age of 30. 99%, and something like 58% of women, right? So it's it's it's really pervasive pornography. And what the Lorde is pushing back against is this identification of the erotic with the pornographic, which doesn't get distinguished enough, right? And this is why I think her essay is so relevant and so important for us to be looking at. What is pornography in contrast to eroticism? And you're talking here about this dark side. I think the pornographic would be the dark side here, at least for Lorde. Okay, you can disagree, but let's have a look at what Lorde has to say about the pornographic, um, which I think is very worthy of our consideration. She says, pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic because it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. Let's get back to that in a second because I just want to say another thing that really stays with me whenever I think about um Lorde's essay. She says that the pornographic is a looking away. When we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with each other, we're engaging in the pornographic. And then she adds to refuse to be conscious of what we're feeling at any time is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. So it's what what is this looking away? I think this is a really useful image to stay with because it's like you are encountering someone, whether it's in a sexual way or a non-sexual way, and you're not actually fully encountering that person. There's a part of you that is not fully present. There's a part of you that is looking away from yourself and from the other person. You're not, you're kind of disengaged, right? And once you disengage from your full human humanity, from your full presence, then you're making yourself and the other person into objects and reducing yourself to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. And this is so relevant because we are so disengaged at the moment. We are off in on the online world, we're hardly present, we're not in our bodies, we're not in our senses in the same way that we used to be, even 20 years ago. And our disengagement, I think Lord would say, is a manifestation of the pornographic because we're not really looking at ourselves and allowing ourselves to be fully present with whatever it is that we're experiencing.
SPEAKER_00Look, far be it for me as a man to be commenting on female sexuality. But what I would say is that in the sense that male sexuality is often cast in a very sort of black and white way, female sexuality is also, and for centuries, has been cast in a very black and white way. And it's very easy to take from Lord's essay, written as it was at a very vital time, and to then simply go a little bit further and say women are into nice things and men are into violent things. Whereas perhaps a more modern version of sexuality is that women are into sometimes uh painful and destructive and amazing and um insatiable things, and men are also into vulnerable things. And I think that this is perhaps since Lord has written the very important essay we have developed. Um I think uh that uh sexuality, and again I'm touching on Palia, who's a very dangerous thinker, because a lot of a lot of uh what she wrote in her essay is highly controversial, and I'm not gonna touch that stuff with a barge pole. But what I will say is that for me, when I'm playing, again, a piece of music, I am erotic in the sense that I am I am not trying to make Beethoven or Bach sound beautiful, I'm trying to make it sound true, and I am trying to make it sound almost violent in its lucidity. And in that sense, I am erotic. And for me, when I hear a female pianist or a male pianist, it's exactly the same. Again, I'm going back also to these the Salem witch trials, and you know, and these these men with uh their gavels and their sticks and um the this uh this horrible stuff. But what was it that actually threatened them so much? And for me, it's this darker sense of the erotic in the quote uncapital W woman. It's the fact that with, you know, magic and with rituals and with incantations, that possibly women have had access to to an erotic tradition that is underlying all of Western culture from Sappho onwards, that we're still uncomfortable with, but that in the 1970s could be expressed often in film. I'm thinking at the same time as uh Audrey Lord was writing this amazing essay, David Cronenberg, albeit a man, was um creating a film called The Brood. And he wrote it after his divorce. Um he was heartbroken after his divorce, and I'm not going to give any spoilers, but it is this tremendous invocation and evocation of woman as erotic in that terrifying but also delectable sense. It's woman connected with body. Now, of course, we can then go even further and then say women are like somehow like connected with their body and sort of in this kind of anti-intellectual way, which is just as rubbish. But I still find the fact that Lorde wrote this to be tremendously uh exciting for when it was written, but we have changed since then. And I think generally in both a positive and a negative way.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Okay. So I think that there is a contradiction in what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell There is, definitely.
SPEAKER_01On the one hand, you're criticizing Lorde because of what we might call her essentialism, because she's specifically saying this is a power that women have, and she's excluding men. And I think you're right to point that out. I think that there is an essentialism there. She's saying women are like this, they have this power, and obviously the implication is non-women don't have this power. So I completely agree with your criticism there, and I think we have moved beyond. Definitely moved beyond that kind of essentialism. But yet you're also saying, giving me these examples of the Salem Witch trials or this film, where it seems that exactly that image of woman as erotic is being uh uh put on a pedestal or being um unpacked. And I think that's precisely the thing that we need to challenge, right? Like if we're challenging Lorde, we need to challenge this filmmaker as well. We need to challenge this identification of woman as such with a capital W with the erotic. So that's where I see the contradiction, but we can run with your first point, the critique of Lorde for essentializing, for making it seem as if it's a specifically woman thing, and say, okay, the erotic underpins humanity. We can just take that out and say, we are in a stage right now, 40 plus years uh after Lord, where what she's saying about women specifically, it actually makes a lot of sense to talk about it as a human power and the pornographic as its dark, dark flip side. And and we all have this erotic in us. So let's recognize it. And if we recognize it and not shy away from it, then we won't allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic. And it's precisely because we've shied away from this embracing of our creative capacity. And I want to get back to what that means, that creative capacity, that so many people are doing a lot of spending a lot of time looking at pornography, right? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. I would agree with you to a point, but I would say that my previous disagreement is not so much a contradiction as an enhancement or a development, because what I'm saying is closer to what Palia and others have said, which is that the erotic sure is a fundament, it is a uh it is a process underlying so much, but that it is not necessarily generative and easily domesticable. Um in that sense, I go more towards uh Palia and I suppose my own experiences. But what I would also say is that what you just said opens up a second line of potential criticism to Lord, which is that if the erotic is everything, then the erotic is nothing. Um the erotic is a tabula russa, or sort of empty table upon which anything can uh can lumber their their projections. That's not necessarily something that I wholly disagree with in a factual sense. If I get a glass in the morning and I put some water on a table, I can really I could conceive of that in terms of erotic knowledge. If I sit at the piano and I want to practice, that can be eroticized. Everything can be eroticized. So the question is, are certain acts intensely or inherently erotic? Or do they have or does the erotic have to be foisted on top of it? And I think that that's more of a complex thing, and that's where sex sits in this kind of dangerous thing, because we all know as human beings, as adults, that our sexual proclivities are not always um uh decorous and not always polite and not always, you know, in imbued with uh great diotima-like love, sitting at the you know, we often we are hungry, um, we are rapacious um animals in many respects. So where is that line between uh um sex and eroticism? And I would argue it's not always so clear.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So let's go back to the text. I think that will help us to um respond to some of these questions that you're raising, Simon. I think one of my favorite passages from the text is this one. Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand more from ourselves and from our lives' pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. So the erotic for Lord is something that once we engage with it, we are feeling deeply. We know what we are capable of experiencing that we can be. And I think of this feeling deeply as something like you're doing, you're playing a piece of music, you're reading a book, you're playing a game, whatever it is, you're engaging in some activity, and you're just really present, and you know what it's like to feel in this moment. And feeling, she says, is different from sensation. So this goes back to your just question: what is the difference between the erotic and mere sex, if we want to put it that way? Mere sex would be just these kind of like nice feelings, sensations that we get in a way. And she wants to say, and the the erotic would be when you're fully there, when you're giving yourself as a person there and you're looking at the other person as a as a person and not just as a kind of object that is going to satisfy your sensations. But just to go back to this idea of feeling deeply, once we know what it is to feel deeply, she says, then we start to expect that of all aspects of our lives. And this means we, and this this is this is why the erotic has a role to play in politics, she says. We stop being satisfied with our own suffering, with our own self-negation. Our acts against oppression become integral with ourselves because we know what we're capable of, when we recognize, she says, our deepest feeling, we begin to stop being satisfied with simply made being made smaller, being told you're not good enough, or being uh sort of subjugated, or you know what I mean? So once we recognize our own power, we she says, we stop willing to accept powerlessness.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell I think that's beautiful. But I would also push back on it, and of course I'm heading into dangerous territory here. What she's essentially arguing, if I'm not mistaken, is that the erotic is about is very concerned with self-actualization. But then I go back to ancient Greek myths and I think of Lita and the swan. I would characterize that as both a horrible, very male-centered, and yet strangely erotic story. I think many people, including women classicists, would argue in in the same way that I just have. Why is it erotic in if that in that case? What is it that makes it erotic? And I would argue it's almost an aesthetic component rather than anything that is to do with, you know, what we would in 2026 with uh, you know, very sort of self-satisfied tones call consent, um, and we would call uh, you know, I think uh there's an aesthetic component almost to it. And in that sense, it's a bit tricky because you could potentially have pornography that is aesthetically pleasing. I don't know if you could have the other way around, which is like the purely erotic, which is not aesthetically pleasing. That to me suggests that uh there is an element of aesthetics rather than what we would um foist in terms of uh you know standards of moral behavior um from 2026 onto, say, Lida and the swan, um, or any number of creation myths which are deeply erotic and yet are very concerning.
SPEAKER_01I see what you're saying. Okay. So let's think about how Lorde would respond to that, uh, about this idea that um these Greek myths were forms of the erotic. What would she say? Well, uh she says I'm again quoting here the erotic allows us to share joy, make connection, and this allows us to be part to participate deeply, she says. It can lead to departicipation, and this deep participation is often the forerunner for joint concerted actions that were not possible before. So for Lorde, the erotic is all about making connections and it's about looking at people, engaging with people. I don't know if the Leda and the Swan myth is actually about making a connection with that person. So if that's the case, then she would Lord would probably say it's actually not erotic.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Well, I mean, if she did say that, kudos to her for st, you know, standing her ground and and basically seeing her point through. Is that Dahlia what you think? Is that what you say? Would you look at, say, some of the more we would say concerning, I don't even know if you can say that, some of the more uh um overtly uh objectifying creation myths, and would you say that they are completely divorced from eroticism?
SPEAKER_01It's a really good question, Simon. Really good. And I'm gonna say I'm not 100% sure what to make of it. But I really love the idea that Lorde has, the kernel of her essay, which is that once you start doing things in this deep feeling way, you are able to engage with whatever activity you're doing and with the other person in a deeper way. And this opens you up to new ways of connecting to people, and it allows you to come together in a different way. I mean, we can think about dialogue, conversations, what we're doing, right? We're engaging with one another deeply, we're looking at each other with great respect and interest, right? And I just think that's what she's talking about. And and this is why, to get back to Diatima, I think this is about the fifth step on the ladder. What happens on the fifth step of the ladder? We are encountering the beautiful as such, unchanging and eternal. So it's outside of time. Suddenly, we're in a space that is no longer touched by the effects of time. And it reminds me of being a child, of playing, right? Before I started to think about a before and after, before I started becoming aware of, oh, I've got to go, I've got to do this, I've got to do that. You're just completely present. You're immersed in whatever you're doing. And this is exactly the creative power that Lord is trying to remind us of. It's when we're fully engaged, fully present, no sense of time. And here it is. We are participating. It's a form of de-participation. We're not outside of it. We're not outside of the beautiful. We are doing the beautiful. This conversation can be seen as that, right? We're not looking at the beautiful anymore. It's not an object anymore. We're fully participating in it, and we lose track of time because we're just present.
SPEAKER_00I think what you're saying, Dahlia, is wonderful. But I would also go further again and say that for me, looking at it, of course, from the perspective of 2026, Audrey Lord is still writing a little bit from the perspective of a decorous and certainly well-heeled view of eroticism. Um, a little. And I mean, again, the things that come into your mind when you're talking about such a stimulating topic, and of course I'm possibly owning myself here. I thought about the uh German poet Gottfried Benn of all people. A difficult poet, um, a concerning poet, a disturbing poet. And one of his most famous poems um is uh about his work as a mortician. And he is uh he is looking through the remains of a woman who was, I believe, if my memory serves me correctly, was a sex worker. And it's Germany in the 1920s. It's awful. The language he uses is awful. This was possibly based on a real woman who had her own dreams and desires and probably had the most awful life. And yet to look at it and to say, therefore, it is not erotic, there is nothing erotic in this, I feel, is a return to the very, very repressed Western mentality that a lot of us still have, which is that uh you know, beauty and uh looking adoringly and non-objectively into our lovers' eyes on one side, and then the absolutely uh um uh separated and uh um you know emotionally stagnant view of hardcore pornography on the other. While there is truth in these, I think that in the the works of art that most inspire me, and I'm thinking, you know, Egon Shirley, I'm thinking of Beethoven, I'm uh thinking of uh Realke, I'm thinking of Gottfried Benn to a large degree, there is something both Apollonian and Dionysian, and at its greatest force, the eroticism is also a force of annihilation. Um I and I think that this is also a recurring theme throughout art. Eroticism can annihilate both the bearer and the bad. Um and it is potentially, without um civilization, and I'm going a bit Freudian here, it can be a tremendously sundering force. And so I like this idea of both man and woman being in um having this erotic carnal desire, and it is society that has to stem them. Otherwise we would still all be back in the uh Sierra doing terrible things to each other, you know, sixty thousand years ago or whatever, two million years ago. I like that form. So if I was going to say anything about Audrey Lord, it would be number one that it's a bit of a table rassa. Um erotic for her. The erotic for her. The erotic she's she's not admitting it, but sh if if anything is erotic, um, even the most uh banal act, it requires something else on top of it. So the erotic is something that is foisted. And the second thing is that it is still heavily premised within a um, you know a little bit of a Western puritanical mindset, um, which was perhaps inadvertently introduced by the symposium. Sex is over here, you know, the porn eye and the flute girls, as we talked about on the episode, are over here. I mean, what's to say that the flute girls are not themselves uh a source of erotic power? Um, is it possible for a person in that era to look at a flute girl and to see a real person, but also have some disavowed thoughts about the flute girl at the same time that are not necessarily unerotic. I think we're talking about very dangerous stuff here because we're talking about parts of humanity that we would rather not look at a lot of the time, and that I think men and women share.
SPEAKER_01Very interesting, Simon. Thanks for all of those thoughts because honestly, the the thing that I kept on going back to is Dionysian festivals. And you've brought up the god Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of what else is he the god of?
SPEAKER_00Oh, he's he's basically the he's the god of knowledge, isn't he? He's the god of uh he's the god of having a good time, he's the god of yeah.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So the god of wine. And you could imagine that we're here at a drinking party, the symposium, and the god of wine is sort of overseeing everything, making sure that everyone's having a good time. But also, Dionysian festivals, they were, they had this very dark element to them. And the menads were women who were inspired by Dionysus, and they purportedly took Orpheus, the great poet, musician, who brought beauty, who was able, through his playing of the lyre, was able to even uh charm the god of the underworld, Hades, and was able to go down into the underworld. He was so he his music was just so enchanting and so beautiful. But the menads, the followers of Dionysus, tore him to pieces, right? So you could see here, this is what I was thinking of when you were talking about these sort of dangerous aspects of the erotic that Paglia brings up and that you're trying to, you know, push back with Lord on. Is yeah, wouldn't it have been better, though, if if the menads were not intoxicated and were not following this god who is all about um tearing things apart. And Orpheus was able to live.
SPEAKER_00It's dangerous, I know, as a man, because you know, I'm I'm saying things that I mean men have routinely for centuries abused in the most horrible, horrible way. I'm almost speaking in an artistic sense, I guess. I am uh thinking again about right when Lord was writing this, there were uh a a subgenre of films in which women would get revenge on men. And they were almost ancient Grecian in in in the poetic justice they were delivered. They were violent and they were horrible. And I watched quite a few of these in my twenties. They traumatized me horribly. Um they were horrible, um, both for the way women were treated and then, you know, the revenge after, even though there was perhaps some satisfaction. But I think that that's no accident. And for me, what that shows, rather than what Lord is saying, which is again returning to your essentialism, is that the erotic is not easily containable a lot of the time. And uh beauty can be dangerous, as we've seen in history repeatedly, and that that split between the garish or the vulgar and the uh honorable and the decorous and the beautiful is a dangerous one and certainly was expressed in uh Christianity and has sort of entered via the back door into every single one of our assumptions in Western culture. You know, I mean, my dad when I was younger was like, you know, lust is very uh it's shallow, Simon, and it uh you should, you know, emotions, um, you know, uh sexual sexual lust is uh is very shallow and you should, you know, go for something deeper, you know, the inner beauty. Um and of course, we all know that that's true, but at the same time it's a bit of an anthem. And how often do we in the West sit there and actually ask, what is this inner beauty we're talking about, and why is it opposed to lust? Why can't lust be something that has enormous depth to it? Why can't lust be an early, admittedly, chemically, but also erotically driven force that that connects us to our beloved?
SPEAKER_01So I think this is exactly what Lord is saying. I think that you are uh imposing dualistic kind of categories on her. I think she's saying exactly that we have vilified the erotic, we have debased it, we have trivialized it and undermined its potential. Let's open this up, let's be fully immersed. And there this means not erasing lust, not taking it off the table, but recognizing it that as a power, as a source of creativity, as a means by which to engage with the world and allowing ourselves to use that power to become more creative and present and engaged with everything, and not just to have it sequestered to sexuality. That's the first thing, and also not to mistake it for pornography, because they're two different things. And I don't think that this is a problematic distinction. I think it's a really important distinction. And lust and pornography should be distinguished if we think of lust as an opening up to this immense power and presence and creativity, and pornography as a closing up precisely towards this power. We choose to ignore, to look away from our own power and from the power of the person in front of us. That's pornography. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00I think it's very clear that we can look at so much of what's online today and say, look, that's porno, um, that's deadening. We can also look at something that is overtly erotic. But I think rather than being clearly bifurcated, that there are so many curious and complex stations in between. And as individuals, both men and women, and of course so much more, it's so, so complex. And many of us, if we're going to be honest in Western culture, like and find erotic charge in things that we perhaps would not be so free to admit to, um, because we still operate within a paradigm of repression and false binaries. Um, and I think that Lord is an incredibly important essay, but I still think it is, you know, this whole idea of uh not just sex and pleasure as truth and women's power and you know, soul and refusal of smallness, that's all true, but that is still a little bit injected with, you know, the uh the Protestant the Protestant idea of, you know, of uh virtue and rising upwards. And uh I still think that there is um underneath this substrate of eroticism that is not pretty, um, that is uh not always kind, um, that is uh sometimes it touches upon objectification. Now what is the what is the line? I don't know what that line is. I know that I have seen many paintings that are very disturbing, that are not about consent at all, and that I found profoundly erotic. Now, why is that? Is that because I'm a creep or is it a little bit more complex than that? I would hope it's I would hope um that it's not because I'm a creep. Um I I think, again, I'm returning to the aesthetic. I think there's an aesthetic element of eroticism that for me differentiates it from just you know turning on uh uh, you know, Internet Explorer and just like searching for whatever your peccadillo happens to be that day.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Look, I mean you said you were traumatized in your twenties by looking at certain things. I think in a way What this conversation is doing is showing us that there is a problem that is very widespread that has become so pervasive that it's even hard for us to be able to tell where the erotic lies and where the pornographic begins. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Look at the world leaders today. Some of the worst world leaders, um, you know, I'm thinking Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, all of these really, really bad people, I think that they see themselves and their own power and their capacity for destruction as erotic. They have eroticized their own power and their own domination. This is where I think things get a little bit murky, to be honest. Trevor Burrus, Jr. So this is but to push back.
SPEAKER_01But this is why Lord is so important, because she helps us to start recognizing that we need to distinguish these things, that the pornographic has pervaded us, that is-we've become so clouded in our judgment and thinking that we need to start looking more carefully. And maybe it's just too hard for some of us because we've been too traumatized early on, and it's too hard to distinguish. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00It's true, but you're kind of not taking up my point there. I mean, is the issue perhaps that the pornographic has colonized the erotic? That's a different question entirely, perhaps. Perhaps for these people who I've just mentioned, and there's so many more, I just named three off the top of my hat. Perhaps for them, the the erotic has itself been uh um colonized, has been uh uh has been ruined, has been desecrated and denigrated so often that the erotic is itself ruined. But I would be lying if I said, even with Alexander the Great, you know, um, that there was nothing erotic. Everything he was doing was pornographic. That's ridiculous. Clearly ridiculous. I think the erotic also has a dark side, um, like love does. Um, and I think as humans, as ethical humans, we are in many ways trying to rise above our animal natures. And that includes the darker, more uh Dionysian aspects of the erotic, which can touch on the pornographic.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell And this is exactly what Lorde is saying. I don't think she is. I don't think she is. We're just not gonna We will just agree to disagree. So so bringing it back to the way that we kicked off this episode, we were talking about Daytima, the final step of the ladder, and the question is how can Lorde's essay help us to understand this mysterious final step? And I've claimed that it helped me a lot. So here is my brief take on it. If, as Lorde claims, the erotic is that which allows us to engage with our deepest feelings and with others in the most present way. It allows us to be fully immersed in what it what we're doing, whether it's work, whether it's relationships, whether it's play, whatever it is. She says the erotic can be in all of these things. If we're really fully present, then we are like children playing. We're no longer in a kind of sense hurried way. We're no longer looking at our watches, checking on what to our to-do lists. We're just there and doing what we're doing and fully productive in this uh you could even call it where we feel full in ourselves. She uses that term. We're fully there. And that is an experience where you don't have time anymore. Time just disappears for you. And for Dayatima, in her final step, she says, the beautiful is the eternal, unchanging. So it's outside of time. And you're seeing it directly, you're no longer seeing it in forms, in objects. And if we think about the erotic as this deep participation, then it's also no longer things that we look at or play with, but it's us being fully engaged. We are directly in the beautiful because and we we have a direct access to the beautiful because we are it. We have become it through our erotic behaviors, our uh relationships, our work that is imbued by this feeling of the erotic.
SPEAKER_00I'm just reminded, and everything you're saying, of Susan Sontag, who, when Lord wrote this essay around the same time, she wrote Against Interpretation, a very famous book.
SPEAKER_01Sontag did.
SPEAKER_00Sontag. And it's called she said in it, and it's it's perhaps a paraphrase, it might be a quote, we need an erotics of art. And for me, this sits very well alongside uh what Audrey Lord is saying. And regardless of whether it can go further or whether something can be erotic for one person and profoundly unerotic for another, which I suspect is true. Um I think that this came at a decisive point for Western civilization and still comes at a decisive point for us now, because we're we are still uh uncomfortable with uh certain desires, and I think we are we are uncomfortable with bodies, with death, with the uh the grittier and perhaps messier, and uh you know, w we're uncomfortable with the bodily body processes in many respects, while claiming to be more open than we ever have. So I think it's what Lord has written is so profoundly relevant to us today.
SPEAKER_01It's become clear to me that Lord's essay is too short. She should have written it a few more pages there to really clarify the distinction between the pornographic and the erotic, but also perhaps to touch upon what you're describing as the more dangerous aspects of the erotic. Because she doesn't even, the word danger doesn't even come up for her. The word ugliness doesn't come up, perversity does, and it's identified with the pornographic. So we could, I think, guess that that's where she would put those other things. I think that nonetheless, I wanna, I just think this essay still is very illuminating and really relevant for us today. And ultimately, I still feel that this space that she opens up that allows us to embrace our feelings in this deep way, and that means for me to be fully present in the way that a child would have been or is while playing, that's the kernel of the essay. And that's what I think is the final step. When you're fully present, there's no more time. This gets to the heart of what this first season of The Wednesday Society is about. It's it's unpacking something that a lot of philosophers refuse to consider, which is the beautiful, desire, erotics, feeling. Those are often swept away, pushed to the side amongst philosophers. And I think that's a problem. And Plato and especially Diatima didn't do that, whatever we might think of them. And for us, part of this uh inspiration for this season is really to look at those crucial aspects of being human and to think about them in a historical and capacious way, and to see what we can learn from these historical texts that really straight on, looked straight on at these very difficult, as you've just been telling us, concepts and tried to make sense of what it means to be human, not just by only looking at reason. And as a final footnote before we close, these things really show us how we differ from AI.
SPEAKER_00If that is not a drop mic for us, I can't improve on that. That is so true. What is it about AI, but it it doesn't have will and it doesn't have friction?
SPEAKER_01Doesn't have desire. Yeah, doesn't have era.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_01You've been listening to the Wednesday Society, where we take out some time of our busy schedule to read and think together. We hope you've enjoyed this first season of the Wednesday Society and invite you to come back for more in season two. I'm Dalia Nassar, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, and very interested in the question: can beauty change your life?
SPEAKER_00And I'm Simon Tedeski, not necessarily practitioner of beauty, but pianist and writer based in Sydney.
SPEAKER_01Our producer and editor is Sarah Alley. Russell Stapleton composed our music, and Bethany Stewart is our sound engineer. Our next season, Philosophy Without Men, will be out later this year. This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council. We're grateful to record at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and also recognize the support of the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Coringay, and our country.