Review
Plato: The Phaedrus. Translation and notes by James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Burger, Ronna: Plato’s “Phaedrus”: A Defense of a Philosophic Art of Writing. University: University of Alabama Press, 1980.
Griswold, Charles: Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
NOTE: The first version of the review of Burger was published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, September 1983. Republished by permission.
No one forgets the image of the human soul, here: the charioteer straining to guide a two-horse team, with the good, white horse pulling against the bad, black horse. The dialogue itself suffers from a more or less unruly bifurcation, with the first part, a dialogue between old Socrates and young Phaedrus on rhetoric, uneasily yoked to their dialogue on love in the second part.
In the introduction to his fine translation, James H. Nichols identifies rhetoric as the dialogue’s “central theme”—not only the topic of the first part but the link to the second, and pervasive therein. Ultimately, the discussion of love leads to Socrates’ true love, wisdom—philosophy being the love of wisdom. And “rhetoric is the crucial link between philosophy and politics”—the realm of rhetoric—”and must take an important place in education if political life and intellectual activity are to be in the best shape possible.” In order to live well, human beings must associate, “coordinate their activities,” and they do this in two ways: persuasion and force.
Readers miss the pervasiveness of rhetoric in the Phaedrus because we are either children of the Enlightenment, demanding facts and `transparency’ from our rulers, impatient with `mere rhetoric,’ or children of the philosophic reaction against the Enlightenment, `postmodernism,’ which contends that all speech and (one is tempted to say) all human communication is rhetorical, that we create our own reality, that Enlightenment itself is yet another trope. Plato’s Socrates thinks differently, and to fail to see this is to fail to see what he, and Plato, are doing. Nichols observes that the Socratic critique of the rhetoric of the Sophists, seen here and elsewhere in the Platonic dialogues, in Aristotle and in Cicero, consists above all of a kind of ability to discern the way to persuade an individual or a group. “Though its importance is great, rhetoric is lower in rank than science or wisdom itself”; in its function as a pathway to science or wisdom, rhetoric “had an important place in higher education for centuries, one might say from the time of Aristotle to 1800 or so.” If Thomas Hobbes and John Locke spearheaded the push against rhetoric from the angle of what would come to be called the Enlightenment—scouting its potential or deception and error—the Romantics’ reaction to that project did not restore rhetoric but rather jabbed at it in the name of `creativity’ and `vision’—precursors of `postmodernism.’
Plato’s Socrates understands rhetoric quite differently, thinking about it from within the polis. The small yet self-governing Greek political community concentrated his mind on questions of persuasion and force, as such dialogues as the Apology and the Republic so clearly illustrate. Nichols compares and contrasts the Phaedrus with another dialogue on rhetoric, the Gorgias, in an especially illuminating way, inasmuch as the Gorgias depicts one of the hardest cases Socrates attempts to treat: Callicles, the tough-minded hedonist. “As the Republic is to the Symposium, so is the Gorgias to the Phaedrus; or equivalently, the Gorgias stands in relation to the Republic as the Phaedrus does to the Symposium.” By this he means that while no dialogue truly contradicts another, each emphasizes a particular theme at the expense of the theme of the others. The Republic‘s theme, justice, crowds out love, whereas in the Symposium just the opposite happens. In parallel to this, the Gorgias “treats rhetoric about justice, the Phaedrus rhetoric about love.” Discussions of justice involve considerations of “harshness and pain”—the effects of the application of force—whereas discussions of love involve considerations of persuasion, of wooing and being wooed. Put another way, in the Gorgias Socrates and his interlocutors talk about the persuasion of `the many,’ the citizens of democratic Athens, of any democracy. In the Phaedrus they talk about the persuasion of one by another, `the few.’
How does this matter for philosophy, for philosophers? Nichols remarks that the lover of wisdom, undistracted by other loves, especially the love of honor and the love of things, “unblended by false opinions and spurious hopes,” can “see most clearly and analyze most effectively any political situation.” To make his glimpses of the wisdom he loves politically effective to whatever extent they might be, he will need rhetoric, inasmuch as he will not, qua philosopher, likely have force on his side. As the argument of the Phaedrus unfolds, the philosopher will want persuasive speeches as a lover, too.
Turning to the dialogue itself, Plato immediately places his reader into an atmosphere redolent of persuasion and seduction. Socrates and Phaedrus meet outside the walls of the city—outside the laws and the law- enforcement powers of civil authority. Here, amidst the fragrant trees, soft grass, and flowing streams lovers might well meet, a place “altogether beautiful” (230d), away from prying and authoritative eyes. One wonders if the tryst-like encounter came about accidentally or by the design of one of the men and, if so, which one.
As for persuasion, Socrates begins by addressing Phaedrus, politician-like, as “my friend” (227a). He asks him where is going and where he is coming from, a question that a master rhetorician, Abraham Lincoln, in his “House Divided” speech remarked to his fellow-citizens “If we could first know where we are”—a situation he traces to its origin, several years earlier—”and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Answers to these questions set us to thinking about beginnings and ends, origins and purposes; the politician seeks may shift to hasten or slow our momentum, change our direction. It is not for nothing that they so often ask us to look back to the founding of our regime, then hold out prospects for getting back on the right, old way or striking out on a better, new one.
Phaedrus has come from the luxurious house of a wealthy man, next to a temple dedicated to the gods of the city—suggesting an Athenian version of the gospel of wealth—where he had listened to the speech-writer Lysias (“the most terribly clever at writing of the men of today”[228a]) read an eloquent speech about love. The houses of the wealthy attract those who can set a rich table for the mind, and Lysias spread out a “feast” of a speech (227b). The speech concerned love—specifically, the relation between the lover and the beloved. The conspicuously poor Socrates, well-known for his fascination with love, will listen eagerly as Phaedrus reads the speech to him. As Nichols observes, they sit under a plane tree, the Greek word for which puns on the name “Plato”; all writing and speaking here proceeds in the shade of the author.
Why does Socrates care about love? They are outside the city, outside its laws and customs, its conventions. Unlike the centuries-distant Enlighteners, however, and unlike such contemporary philosophic debunkers of convention as Democritus and Protagoras, Socrates sees that the myths that reinforce political conventions are explicable but not strictly refutable by naturalistic analysis. Rather than philosophizing by engaging myths head-on, “I examine not them but myself, whether I happen to be some wild animal”—the sort one might encounter beyond the city’s walls—”more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon, or a gentler and kinder animal having by nature a share in a certain lot that is divine and without arrogance” (230a). Socrates philosophizes by directing his gaze at his own soul, and the soul of others, where he might discover truth more readily than myth-wranglers do. “I am a lover of learning” (234d), he tells Phaedrus–apparently a docile species, easily led by eloquence.
Judging from the speech Phaedrus then reads, Lysias is indeed clever. Lovers, he claims of “sick rather than of sound mind”: they “are thinking badly but have not power to master themselves” (231d). Non-lovers are “masters of themselves,” and therefore “choose what is best instead of reputation among human beings” (232a). Non-lovers stay cool and discerning. But lovers are jealous; they don’t want their beloved to associate with the wealthy or the educated—those who might benefit the beloved, stealing him from the lover. Jilted, a lover will seek revenge. A non-lover values you for your soul, a lover for your body.
The joke is that Lysias is in fact a lover. He affects a non-lover’s diffidence to win the beloved—presumably Phaedrus or any other glistening, listening lad. By inviting Phaedrus to admire him for his self-control and disinterested regard for others’ well-being, he seduces. The proof that it works is the enraptured fan-boy Socrates now sets out to cure of his enthusiasm by redirecting it toward a better person and a better kind of love.
Socrates begins unlike Lysias, claiming to have been “struck senseless” by the speech issuing from Phaedrus’s “divine head” (234d). Having flattered the boy, Socrates moves immediately to separate him from his coy master: “I applied my mind to its rhetorical aspect alone and I didn’t think that even Lysias himself thought this to be sufficient” (235a)—repetitive, show-offish, not really persuasive at all. He asks the admirer of rhetorical performance first to think and not so much to feel, and then to think that Lysias’s thought might be superior to his speech. He invites Phaedrus to think about the thought behind the speech. And Socrates can be coy, too, in his own way flirting with Phaedrus by saying that he, Socrates can do better than Phaedrus’s “boyfriend,” but hesitates to do so. He thus gets the lover of speeches to desire him, or at least a speech from him., to beg a favor from the homely, poor old man.
Well, Phaedrus, if you insist: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful boy, or rather youth, who had a great many lovers” (237b). T’is a fairy tale likely to catch the attention of a much-desired youth, always eager to hear a story about someone like himself. “A certain one of them [Lysias, perchance?] was wily and, while no less in love than anyone, had persuaded the boy that he did not love him” (237b). Socrates gives this unloving lover a speech quite different than that of Lysias. It begins not with a description of the non-lover, of a person, but with a teaching about how to think, and therefore how to think about the thought of a speech from a self-professed non-lover who really may have designs on you. “There is one ruling principle for those who are to deliberate finely,” namely, to know what you’re talking about. Start with clear definitions (237b-c). If you can’t say what love is, you can’t tell the difference between a lover and a non-lover. And you can’t say what anything is unless you see the idea of it—that cluster of commonalities that we intuit from examining similar particulars.
We try to do this whenever we use a noun. But in doing so we need to distinguish further between nature and opinion or convention, for example, “the desire of pleasures that is naturally planted in us, and another acquired opinion that aims at the best”–two things that sometimes “engage in factious struggle” within our own minds (237d-e). If opinion “leads with reason and wins mastery” we are moderate; if “desire without reason drags us toward pleasures an rules in us” we incline toward “wanton outrage” (237e-238a). Love is such a potentially tyrannical desire. Looking around the bower in which he now recline, Socrates comically worries about “becoming possessed by nymphs” (238d). Little danger of that, for Socrates, who observes that a person animated by such a domineering passion will want to dominate the beloved, wanting him weak and pliable, keeping him away “from the association from which he might be most intelligent”: “divine philosophy” (239b). And when the beloved grows weary of his (older) lover’s persistent attentions and petty jealousies, the lover will turn hater, seeking the ruin of his beloved. “These things, then, you must meditate on, my boy, and know that the friendship of a lover does not come into being with good will, but in the manner of food, for the sake of repletion, as wolves cherish lambs, so do lovers love boys.” (241c-d).
So ends Socrates’ cautionary tale. He readies himself to leave, but Phaedrus begs him to stay and talk some more. Socrates agrees, undoubtedly noticing that the boy accustomed to being the beloved has turned into a needy lover. He has convinced a spoiled, pretty-boy dilettante that he needs the attentions of an ugly old man. Along the babbling brook, Socrates now sinks the hook into this glittery young trout. You have “forced me to speak” a “terrible, terrible” speech, he exclaims (242d). The surprise turn works, causing the complacent erstwhile beloved to wonder–which in Plato’s dialogues enjoys the status of the beginning of wisdom as surely as does the fear of God in the Bible. Why terrible? Because a gentleman of noble breeding would regard them as “people who had been raised mostly among sailors and had seen no love worthy of free men” (243c). Socrates proposes a new speech to “wash away” the “briny bitterness” of the vulgar sailor-talk (243d). This will turn out to be a much longer speech than the first, but Socrates has prepared Phaedrus for listening to it to the end, driven by desire for the truth about love, and likely the desire for the approval of gentlemen of good breeding.
Lovers are mad, but is madness simply a bad thing? After all, prophetesses and diviners and poets are mad, yet they glimpse the divine. How to tell the difference between divine and destructive madness? Socrates then takes the turn Nichols has alerted us to: Rather than attempting to divine what is divine and what isn’t, look at yourself. “One must first… grasp in thought the truth about the nature of the soul, both divine and human, by seeing its experiences and deeds” (245c). “All soul is deathless”(245c)—always moving, often self-moving and therefore in a sense self-caused; it moves the body but is not necessarily moved by the body. “The nature of the soul” is “that which itself moves itself” (245e), moving the body but not moved by anything else. Following his own recommended procedure, Socrates has provided the beginning of a definition of the soul.
But it isn’t easy to complete the definition because the human soul proves difficult for itself to understand. We cannot state a clear definition of it because it consists of contradictory elements. But we can say what is like. We can understand our souls better with an image of the soul. This is the celebrated image of the soul as “a mixture” of three creatures: a charioteer and two horses, on “noble and good,” the other “hard” and “troublesome” (246b). The charioteer would rule the horses, but the unruly hard and troublesome one wants no part of that. Although the charioteer, the soul’s capacity for reason, sees the “colorless and shapeless and impalpable” ideas (247e), in each actual soul it succeeds in ruling only to a greater or lesser extent. Given the distractions forced upon it by the bad horse, reason often goes away “unfulfilled in respect to the sight of being,” of what is true, and “make[s] use of opinion for nourishment” (248b). Socrates outlines a typology of souls, ranging from the reasoning philosopher, who loves “the beautiful;” to the courageous, war-leader king; to the prudent politician or businessman; to the disciplined athlete or clear-eyed physician, both of whom attend rightly to the care of the body; to that madly divining prophet; to the poet “concerned with imagination”; to the patient and attentive craftsman or farmer; to the manipulative sophist or demagogue; and finally to the tyrant (248d-e). Seeing the likeness or image of the human soul’s nature enables Socrates to define nine recognizable types or subspecies of the soul, a typology that puts philosophy first, tyranny last, and prophetic madness exactly in the middle. The philosopher is the one whose “thought is furnished with wings” that enable him to soar closer to the “divine”—that is, to the ideas that define all the things we encounter—than any other type of soul can do (249c). For his nature “the many” rebuke him, incapable of seeing what he sees and therefore necessarily misunderstanding what he does (249d).
Far from being an agent of cold if virtuous moderation, then, the philosophic soul is the true lover, the one animated by the best and most powerful eros. The corrupt soul feels no awe when he sees beauty embodied in one such as Phaedrus, instead reacting to it like an animal, longing to possess the body instead of the form or idea that defines that body’s beauty. The philosopher is the true lover of beautiful youths, precisely because he has no interest in their bodies except as embodiments of forms perceived by the mind instead of the senses, which know only as beasts know. Each type of soul will choose “from the beautiful ones his love after his fashion” (252d), benefiting or injuring those ones also after that fashion. Good souls will benefit the one they love, “if he is caught” (253c). Phaedrus, take note.
Socrates now elaborates on his image-likeness of the soul. The charioteer represents reason as it attempts to rule. It can do so because the good horse—lover of moderation, capable of feeling shame, “a comrade of truthful opinion” and willingly “guided by command and speech”—can help it overbear the pull of the bad horse—”strong-necked,” “a comrade of wantonness and boasting,” a beast “barely yielding to the whip and goads” (253e). The image parallels the account of the soul Socrates elaborates in the Republic—there with the images of gold, silver, and bronze. In the Phaedrus Socrates emphasizes how difficult such rule is, how hard the charioteer needs to pull the reins when the beloved’s eye meets his own. And he offers a cognate warning to Phaedrus respecting friendships: “at no time has it ever been allotted by fate for a bad man to be a friend to a bad man nor for a good man not to be a friend to a good man” (255b). Beware, then, the likes of Lysias. A true lover draws his love from “goodwill,” not merely from bodily eros (255b). “If the better parts of their thought conquer, leading them into a well-arranged way of life and philosophy, they lead a blessed life and a life of one mind here below, being masters of themselves and orderly, enslaved in regard to that by which the soul’s badness was arising within freed in regard to that by which virtue was arising” (256b). Only this way can moderation co-exist with the divine madness of love. As for un-philosophic but honor-loving souls, they too can enjoy friendship, if of a lesser sort; they “grasp and accomplish the choice that is deemed blessed by the many” (256c)—those who, more than two millennia later, find themselves admiring the bonds of comradeship found in bands of brothers who share in the dangers of combat.
This inspires Phaedrus to join in a prayer for Lysias, that he might be turned—the Greek word can also mean converted—to philosophy, and thereby become a true lover. Phaedrus worries that Lysias may remain a mere speechwriter for politicians. Politicians, he observes, do not love their speechwriters, regarding them with contempt; politicians write no speeches for fear of being called sophists, who write all too much. Phaedrus loves Lysias in the sense that he feels goodwill toward him, but he now sees that Lysias’s way of life leaves him vulnerable to denigration by the very ones he would serve. Politicians love honor and fear the dishonor associated with writings because dishonorable men, sophists, have appropriated the art of writing and thereby have brought it into disrepute. If philosophy can redeem lovers and their speeches, can it redeem writing from the sophists? The link between the first part of their dialogue, on love, and the second part, on writing, turns out to be the question of the honorable. That is, the link between the two parts of the dialogue resembles the middle or `linking’ part of the soul: the good, honor-loving and moderate, serviceable horse that enables reason to rule the darker passions.
Socrates begins by remarking that in fact statesmen do write down “what’s greatest in their thinking” (256e). So it may be that what is shameless and bad in writing is not writing itself but writing what is shameless and bad. What, then, is beautiful writing? And what is bad writing? Good writing has to do with careful thinking. Socrates here introduces another of his images, the comical story of persons so enamored of songs and singing that they are reincarnated as cicadas, mindless insects, which sing all day long up in the trees, here in the countryside. But for a good speaker, as distinguished from a rhapsodizing fool, thought and knowledge precede speech. Although Phaedrus now betrays a continued attraction to bad or deceptive rhetoric—arguing that a speaker may only need to day what seems beautiful or true to the many—Socrates easily gets him to admit that the “harvest” from such a use of “the rhetorical art” would prove “not quite a proper one” (260d). Rhetorical speaking is an art, and like all arts it serves as an instrument for some thought. If rational thought is the most truthful kind, and if philosophy seeks wisdom, truth, by means of rational thought, then if a speaker “does not adequately philosophize, he will also never be adequate to speak about anything” (261a)—a piece of kind exaggeration aimed at a youth who needs a good-willed speaker to exaggerate as a means of engaging his attention. Socrates’s discussion of good rhetoric also exemplifies it.
Socrates then asks a leading question—that is, a kind of rhetorical question but also an educative one—`education’ literally meaning `leading out,’ as commencement speakers never tire of explaining. Is “the rhetorical art”—”a restrained leading of the soul through speeches”—exclusively a matter of public speaking, or is it also an art to be exercised in private (261a)? We know the answer from the nature of the question itself, but at first Phaedrus does not, saying that the rhetorical art is for public use only. Socrates shows him otherwise. Rhetoric involves the ability “to liken everything to everything”—Socrates has already provided several such likenesses—often in small steps, which are harder to perceive than big ones. This implies an ability to “precisely distinguish the likeness and unlikeness of beings” (261e). Coyly denying that he has “any share in some art of speaking”—it must have been the cicadas who inspired him, here, he avers—he then recurs to a critique of Lysias’s speech with regard to this matter of deceptive, small steps. It is not always easy to perceive physical differences; one can mistake one metal for another; it is still easier to deceive when it comes to immaterial distinctions such as that between justice and injustice. A would-be practitioner of the rhetorical art must “first divide up these things in a systematic way and have grasped some characteristic of each form” (263b). The many will have difficulty doing this by themselves, which suggests immediately that the preparation for rhetoric must be private, in the soul of the rhetorician or perhaps between himself and a friend or friends. Next, the rhetorician must classify each thing into its “family” (263c); that is, a true identification of likenesses must follow a true identification of unlikenesses or distinctions. Because love is not one of the easier-to-define material things but ranks among the more disputable immaterial things, and Socrates famously thinks a lot about love, Socrates can describe himself, with a touch of irony and another of seriousness, as “one who knows nothing” (264b). A philosopher loves wisdom but does not think he has fully attained it, and that is a large part of his wisdom.
Socrates next likens a speech to an animal: it “must be put together to have a certain body of its own” in which all the pieces fit together (264c). Socrates’ speech here divides itself by dividing the topic of love. Love is a sort of madness, but madness can be of either of two kinds: one arising from illness; another “arising from a complete change, of divine origin, away from accustomed legal usages” (265a). One now sees that the setting of the Phaedrus—itself a writing containing speeches—outside of the city prefigured a description of the divine kind of love, outside conventions, laws. The divine also has its divisions: prophetic inspiration as symbolized by Apollo; mystical initiation as symbolized by Dionysus; poetic inspiration as symbolized by the Muses; erotic madness as symbolized by Aphrodite and Eros, “the overseer of beautiful boys” (265c). Socrates artfully draws Phaedrus’s attention to eros as protector and guide instead of destroyer and flatterer. He continues to want Phaedrus to choose the good horse. As for rhetorical speech, it too should be divided—specifically, into praise and blame. But how can each of these divisions of rhetorical speech be truly (as we moderns would say) `empowered’? Given that the rhetorician seeks a sort of authority and therefore a form of power over others, what makes this possible?
This brings Socrates back to the nature of the thought behind the speech, and also to a revelation of the kind of lover he is. Socrates esteems “him whose sight comprehends things dispersed in many places to lead them into one idea, so that by defining each thing, he makes clear what, on teach occasion, he wishes to teach about” (265d); “I myself, for one, Phaedrus, am a lover of these dividings apart and belongings together, so that I may be capable of speaking and thinking,” and if Socrates sees someone else who can do this, he pursues him (266b). Such persons are “dialectical” (266c), and Nichols follows up with a note suggesting that Zeus is “Dia,” that “dialectic” means choosing Zeus in the sense of choosing the supreme god of the Olympian pantheon: hence, I take it, the previously-stated myth about philosophers `following’ Zeus. To follow Zeus is to be dialectical.
That is only the beginning of the rhetorician’s philosophic need. Not only definitions but narratives and testimonies, proofs, probabilities, confirmation and refutation all occupy the thoughts of the skilled dialectician before he opens his mouth to speak. In practical terms, too, he must know certain things: how to cause certain desired effects in his audience; to whom he should speak, when, and how long. He needs to know “how many forms the soul has” (271d), so that he can address different kinds of souls. Although (as Nichols remarks) in the Gorgias Socrates had criticized Pericles as a rhetorician, here he praises that student of Anaxagoras for his serious philosophic preparation for the life of statesmanship, including the art of speaking And Socrates extends his recommendations to rhetoricians to other arts, such as medicine. All require prior knowledge, careful preparation of the soul of the would-be practitioner. Socrates seeks to lead Phaedrus at best to the way of life of philosophy, but perhaps at least to the life of what the French call an homme sérieux.
But what has this discussion of rhetorical speech have to do with writing? And why should politicians want to write down their best speeches? Does the very act of writing somehow transform the speech as spoken, the words of a live speaker to a live audience? Speakers know how to perceive the changing mood of a group or an individual, but a writer cannot know this so intimately, if at all. It is time for another myth, this one from outside Greece altogether.
“I heard,” Socrates claims, of an “old god” or demon of Egypt, Theuth, discoverer of “number and calculation, geometry and astronomy… draughts and games of dice,” and, for the less mathematically-minded, written letters. Theuth brought his discoveries to King Thamos, who reviewed the god’s findings, “express[ing] blame on the one hand, praise on the other” (274d). That is, the god learns and teaches but the king, the political man, judges. Although Theuth maintains that the art of writing will make Egyptians “wiser and provide them with better memory,” Thamos doubts that “most artful Theuth” judges wisely at all: “one person is able to bring forth the things of art, another to judge what allotment of harm and benefit they have for those who are going to use them” (274e). Writing, the king says, will actually undermine memory by getting people in the habit of relying on records outside their own minds instead of “reminding themselves from inside, by themselves” (275a). This is a “drug” for reminding but not for memory. Further, writing will supply to students “the opinion of wisdom” but “not truth”—book-smart, not life-smart (275a). The reader of Plato’s own written words recalls that Socrates had left unexplained Athenian politicians’ practice of writing down their speeches. It is not simply a matter of Athenian or even Greek practice versus Egyptian practice because Socrates almost immediately tells Phaedrus that it does not matter where a speaker comes from, only if what he says is true.
To the report of Theuth’s criticisms of writing, Socrates adds another, in the form of still another likeness. Writing resembles painting in the sense that (unlike speakers) neither written words nor pictures have the capacity to answer questions. More, writings and paintings can be gazed at by anyone. True, a cat can look at a king, but the king can put a cat in its place, whether out the door or on his lap. But writings and paintings cannot defend themselves by themselves—both dumb and inert.
Socrates then answers his own objection, and also the king’s objections to writing. One may write in such a way that speaks to some readers while keeping silent to others. Another likeness: a farmer sows seeds at the right time of the year; that is part of his art. Writing serves the philosopher as a reminder “for himself, when he comes into an old age of forgetfulness” and also “for everyone who is going after the same track” (276d). That is, readers who use “the dialectical art” (276e) will read writings that require them to complete the thought, identify distinctions and likenesses that mislead the more careless readers, who in their very carelessness will overlook a teaching that might otherwise get the written work banned or even burned. Carefully-written speeches have a playful quality in two ways: they remind thinkers without thinking for them; they cajole dialectically-minded or philosophic readers—those of “many-colored” souls—to further thought while reassuring unphilosophic or “simple” souls (277c). The best speeches “are a reminders for those who know,” markers outside the soul re-minding the soul of things within it. Such speeches are “like genuine sons” of the philosopher, “first the speech in himself, if having been found, it is present in him, and next if some offspring and at the same time brothers of this one have naturally grown in other souls of others in accordance with their worth” (278a-b). The best written speeches act as seeds in soils receptive to philosophy, to the dialectical souls among their readers.
Socrates concludes in his capacity as a living speaker to a living interlocutor, urging Phaedrus to report back to Lysias, another man of possible philosophic potential. We have heard speeches by “the nymphs’ stream and sanctuary” enjoining us to advise three types of writers: speechwriters like Lysias; poets like Homer; lawmakers like Solon (278c-d). All writers should seek the truth, dialectically, knowing himself to be not a sage or wise man but a lover of wisdom or philosopher. In a pious last touch, Socrates prays to “friend Pan and however many other gods are here” to “grant me to become beautiful in respect to things within” and—recalling in all likelihood the wealthy household where Phaedrus heard Lysias read his speech—”whatever things I have outside, grant that they be friendly to the things inside me,” specifically, that I truly know that the wise are the truly wealthy and that I truly desire to be as rich as “the moderate man of sound man could bear or bring along” (279b-c). This brings Phaedrus back to the moderation Lysias had pretended to exhibit but now with an appreciation for the right kind of eros.
In his afterword, James Nichols further illuminates the dialogue by situating it within Platonic dialogues that offer different treatments of similar themes—an example of the dialectical art of making distinctions and identifying likenesses, of dividing and grouping. For example, he finds a “rare clue” for interpreting Socrates’ “tales and images” in the Meno, where Socrates teaches (in Nichols’s paraphrase) that “we would be better, more courageous and less lazy if we believed we ought to seek for what we did not know than if we accepted the sophist paradox that we could never find what we didn’t know.” That is, the myths, which appeal to a sort of trust, even naivete, give souls the opportunity to test them dialectically, whereas dogmatic denial of the possibility of knowledge in the first place closes off the soul to dialectic and thus to any possibility of any knowledge that a thinker might attain. And as for good speeches, written or unwritten, their likeness to living beings with well-fitted parts suggests that such well-wrought assemblages of words do indeed live—in the souls of attentive readers and listeners.
In her book, Ronna Burger addresses the question of writing first and last. In presenting the story of the dialogue between Theuth and Thamos in a story of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, we learn that the meaning of the first dialogue “cannot be handed down, must be sought through an act of self-discovery which replaces unmoving trust in the fixed authority of the tale with the motion of living thought. The paradoxical written condemnation of writing thus shows itself to be only apparently self-contradictory: to heed its warning is to overcome the need for that warning and thus to realize the potential value of the written word.” She points to Socratic irony as the verbal epitome of the technique writing can imitate, as irony remains lost to the thoughtless but perceptible to knowers and those on the road to knowledge. “Precisely through the acknowledgment of its own potential dangers, the Platonic dialogue sets in motion the activity of interpretation as its own realization” (2-3). Socrates’ myths provide just such double-sided clues to the unified meaning of a Platonic dialogue, and may even point us toward an understanding of the unity of his dialogues taken as a whole. “The Platonic defense of a philosophic art of writing thus preserves that profound sense of irony which Socrates himself would be compelled to admire in the playful imitator who made him immortal” (7).
The character of Phaedrus himself “fulfills all the potential dangers against which the dialogue itself becomes a warning” (8). Phaedrus seeks flattering entertainment in speeches like that of Lysias; he “thrives on freedom and leisure without redeeming those conditions through the practice of philosophy,” practicing moderation “only for the sake of bodily well-being” (9-10). Yet this seemingly self-serving youth has—thanks to his preferred pastime—caused his soul to be “penetrated [as it were, given the eroticism of the setting], without acknowledgment, by the opinions of the public experts he reveres” (10). Flattery proves more insidious than he supposes; beneath his self-conceit lies a reservoir of innocence, easily tapped by rhetoricians with design on his person. Because Phaedrus sees “no intermediary between willingness and force, because he is completely unaware of the power of persuasion,” he is “easily persuaded” (13). As a passive listener, his pure, un-dialogic, un-dialectical receptivity denies him self-knowledge, for which neither audience-like receptivity, artist-like self-assertion, or even the Cartesian introspection of philosophy’s future alone can suffice. “The interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of others which Socrates prize so highly is precisely what Phaedrus lacks” (17).
The demagogue and democrat Lysias uses rhetoric for the purpose of acquisition—of money in the houses of the rich, of political power with the many, and of not-so-thoughtful youths like Phaedrus. His art of writing mirrors a democrat’s demagogy inasmuch as “the essential nature of the written word” addresses “everyone in general” and “no one in particular” (19). Speaking or writing in a democratic regime inclines speakers to what Tocqueville calls “general ideas”—impressive-sounding notions big enough and vague enough to catch all. “In the central section of the dialogue Socrates suggests that the greater the extent of the ambiguity in the word, hence in its referent, the greater the power of rhetoric to deceive (263b)” (22). A demagogue’s praise of general ideas suggests a dispassionate, non-lover’s attachment to the good of all, and least of all an attachment to self-interest. Lysias woos Phaedrus in the same way as he woos the many. By contrast, the philosopher loves the truly general, the ideas understood as forms, which serve to clarify rather than to obscure. Whereas the city proves hospitable to the arts of acquisition—barter and money, vehicles of exchange for goods of the body, public speeches and writing, vehicles of exchange for goods of the soul—in the Phaedrus Socrates ventures into “the natural beauty of the sacred grove” (29) in order to show Phaedrus the distinction between good and bad exchange in the light of ideas, the natural forms.
Socrates entices Phaedrus to think about the idea or form of love, needed to defend love against Lysias’s hypocritical praise of non-loving. In the first of his two speeches on love Socrates claims to have fallen victim to nympholepsy–the condition of having been carried away. He appears to have been carried outside of himself. In his second speech he recalls himself to himself, citing the “divine reminder within himself” (33), the daimonion or guardian spirit which prevents him from self-endangerment. Phaedrus needs to hear about both of those dimensions of the soul; he needs to `get outside himself,’ away from his complacent status as a love-object, while also hearing a warning against the mindlessness which leaves souls vulnerable to being filled with deceiving speeches. While philosophy leads the erotic or yearning soul toward the ideas and away from “concern with the self” (42), political philosophy guards that soul against immersion in otherworldliness. “The divine madness which Socrates experiences is in fact moderation,” allowing “Socrates to remember himself,” “his own nature,” which is erotic (44). But if the best eroticism is philosophy, and philosophy is dialogic, one can only learn speech from one’s fellow humans, not out in the woods. The whole of eros must include the family, the village, and finally the city, and philosophy must account for these human things, all of which instantiate different forms of eros. The gods of the city and the gods outside the city, subjects of mythic speeches, point us toward the ideas in nature for which they may be taken as images. “The divine madness which is the object of Socrates’ praise is none other than the act of reasoning the particular power of the philosopher, who thus constitutes the standard of what it means to be human” (60). To imagine the human soul as “a wingless, wing-growing bird” re-minds the thoughtful reader of his own “eros of the beautiful,” his own “essential nature” (60).
To so entice Phaedrus Socrates must destroy his trust in writing “in its clarity and firmness,” thereby “set[ting] in motion the internal process of thought” (77). “The content of Lysias’s speech, which conceals the whole of eros in order to condemn one part, is mirrored in its form, which conceals its own principle of arrangement in order to appear exhaustive” (78); Platonic writing, an artifact whose maker imitates the form of a living animal, gives life to the written word by drawing out the erotic longings of the reader, innate but stupefied by the rhetoricians’ writings and the conventions they seek to reinforce. If you want me to love you, Phaedrus, become a dialectician (81). And if you seek to persuade others to love you, Phaedrus, must you not philosophize, know what you are talking about?
In returning to the story of Theuth and Thamos, Burger brings out dimensions of the story unlikely to be seen by readers not conversant with ancient Egypt, as Plato and his immediate readership were. This is the only Socratic speech in the Phaedrus which is itself a dialogue, making it “a dialogue within the dialogue” (90). More, “the fitting model of that writing which is `truly like the painting of living animals’ is Egyptian hieroglyphics” (90). Hieroglyphic or imagistic writing is to myth what alphabetic writing is to logos because alphabetic or logical writing, which abstracts from language as a literal word-picture, brings its adepts closer to the ideas than myth. “Precisely that written work which betrays an awareness of its own lack of clarity and firmness, and thereby demonstrates its knowledge of when to speak and when to remain silent, would reveal he possibility of overcoming the reproach against the shamefulness of writing alienated from Socrates’ erotic dialectics” (91). Ancient, tradition-bound Egypt contrasts with Greek openness to reason—an openness that has its limits, as Socrates’ trial and execution remind us, but openness still. Socrates died by poison. “As a drug, writing is both remedy and poison,” its danger being “its power to produce the appearance of wisdom without its reality” (95). “Writing can be a drug of reminding only when recognized as no replacement for memory” (96) but as an invitation to thought, “the living process of thought which [writing] ought to set in motion” (97). The god-king Thamos rejects writing because he is a god, but Socrates and his fellow humans perennially stand in need re-minding. “Insofar as man is unlike the gods, hence not at rest on the back of the heavens and feasting on the views of the beings which always are, the value of all `earthly likenesses’ lies in their power as reminders of what was once known” (96). Hieroglyphic writing, “the art of a class of initiates,” an aristocratic art, “replaces the demand for logos with the memorization of received opinion” (98). Atomistic, democratic alphabetic writing, for all the shortcomings of atomism and democracy, nonetheless features dialectics in its basic structure of vowel and consonant. The playfulness of this remark illustrates the merit of the right kind of writing. “By questioning its own clarity and firmness” in a way hieroglyphics cannot, “the Platonic dialogue refuses to present itself as a replacement for living thought; by transforming itself into a playful `reminder to the knower’ the dialogue demonstrates its serious worth,” its capacity to activate “the drama of thought” (105). “The written work which admits the ultimate seriousness of dialectics, and therefore acknowledges its own necessary playfulness, betrays knowledge of the truth that is not other than Socratic knowledge of ignorance” (106). Although not written in the form of a dialogue, Burger’s commentary itself deters untoward attempts at nympholepsy while encouraging thoughtful interpretation.
Nichols emphasizes the theme of rhetoric, Burger the theme of writing. Both touch on Griswold’s preoccupation, the theme of self-knowledge, which he regards as the underlying, unifying theme of the dialogue. Like Nichols and Burger, he regards “the form of the dialogue… as intrinsic to its meaning as the content” (2); any serious interpretation of a text, philosophic or otherwise, must take its genre into account. Plato chooses to write dialogues. How does that fact relate to his self-understanding as a philosopher?
Self-knowledge changes in the course of the dialogue from understanding oneself as a whole person to understanding one’s own soul, and finally to understanding the soul as such. Self-knowledge in all three senses has moral significance and it encompasses more than `psychology’ or soul-knowledge but requires an understanding of the soul as it relates to the ideas or forms. Rhetoric comes in as the link between knowledge and morality, inasmuch as it isn’t enough to know who and what you are, and what is good for you, but also to induce yourself to strive for the good life. The topic of self-knowledge points to the topic of knowledge itself, which can be conceived as a “metaphysical” enterprise—the apprehension of Being—but also as an analytical enterprise in which one applies a method (6). The “return to nature” outside of the city, unique to the Platonic corpus, suggests an eschewal of convention; nonetheless, this return if “rife with reminders of gods” and “nymphs,” myths as well as logical arguments (9). Plato’s Socrates does not take the opportunity to be `out in nature’ as a warrant for direct observation of natural objects, as a modern scientist would do. Why?
Griswold observes that “Phaedrus’s very shortcomings make him an ideal character for what I take to be the central theme of the dialogue” (18). Phaedrus conspicuously lacks self-knowledge. “Plato chose to say something about self-knowledge by constructing dialogue between someone who possesses a knowledge of his own ignorance and someone who is ignorant of even his own ignorance” (18). Phaedrus praises the speeches of Lysias and Socrates, but he seldom if ever asks questions, not being “naturally inclined to Socratic cross-examination” (21). He is unerotic and unpolitical, and thus susceptible to Lysian rhetoric, which preys upon the ignorant. Phaedrus inclines to materialism, but not thoughtfully so. Like an Athenian version of Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, he speaks Epicureanism without knowing it. His enthusiasm for written speeches makes sense in this natural setting because “the silence of Lysias’ written speech and of nature is dangerously conducive to Phedran thoughtlessness” (24); “unlike Phaedrus, Socrates understands that he nevertheless needs the polis and what it can teach him about himself” (25), and this is one reason why he leaves the city behind for a day while bringing the city’s myths about nature with him.
If Phaedrus needs Socrates without knowing it, does Socrates need Phaedrus? In political terms, he does. “Phaedrus is to serve as an intermediary between Socrates and the `opinion makers’ of the city” (27), those who can choose to harm Socrates’ philosophizing or leave it alone. Socrates never has “a dialogue with the many,” although of course he does address them in the Apology; “yet he wishes to present them with a defense of philosophy” (27). Phaedrus, potentially what we today would call a `public intellectual,’ might convey “to the city a partial, politically useful defense of philosophy” (27), given his inclination to praise speeches he likes. What is more, the dialogue with Phaedrus itself teaches Socrates about himself; self-knowledge requires not only introspection but dialectical conversation, inasmuch as “the soul cannot know itself without the mirrorlike presence of another soul” (30). But why this soul, the soul of clueless Phaedrus? Because “by looking at a degraded image of eros Socrates can challenge himself to think through again the nature of eros” (33). A friend in need is a friend indeed!
Socrates enters the natural world beyond the city, the world in which the city has been situated, with eyes wide open and never in a Rousseauian mood of reverie. He’s “been in this area before,” and, while “remarkably sensitive to the beauty of the spot” (34), he knows both its goodness and its danger. “Nature is not good without qualification,” with its worrisome local gods, its “soporific” cicadas, and “the heat of the noontime sun” (36). Neither life in nature nor life in the city yields self-knowledge, by themselves. The in-betweenness that this thought evidently commends mimics the in-betweenness of the soul animated by love—longing, never at rest. Phaedrus “loves rhetoric but does not understand its deeply political function,” and he doesn’t love nature at all (38). He is the opposite of Socrates, who “knows how to get out of the city’s confines and look at what is natural, but also knows that he needs the city in order to learn about himself” (38). Socrates refuses to reduce the political to the apolitical elements of the natural world, in the manner of a modern `social scientist’; he also refuses to dismiss nature by claiming, with `postmodernists,’ that `everything is political.’ His tales and images—eros as a monstrous and tyrannical Typhon, the soul as a sane and moderate natural animal—both capture one dimension of his own soul as a philosopher, characterized by both erotic madness and law-abiding reasonableness. “While the human soul aspires to the divine, its highest achievement (in the persona of the philosopher) is to follow Zeus, not to usurp him. This desire is, admittedly, thought by nonphilosophers to be mad and arrogant.” (42) This is another way of saying that self-knowledge isn’t separate from the world, from the whole; and, being godlike without being god, the philosopher’s “self-knowledge is not terminable as long as one lives” (43). There is always more to know.
You wouldn’t know that from Lysias’s speech, which aims at foreclosing thought, not spurring it. Griswold rightly identifies Lysias as a pretended non-lover who is out to seduce Phaedrus, the lover of speeches. Animated by “enlightened self-interest,” by which Griswold means selfish calculation; his reason amounts only to “an instrument for the satisfaction of desire”—an art. Lysias is not simply wrong: “there is a level at which reason and desire collide”; “reason and desire must collaborate if a person is to be satisfied”; a philosopher does need to detach himself from sexual desire (48). But his eroticism, such as it is, is only skin deep. Lysias “assumes that his self-knowledge does not require the discursive mediation of another person”; “think[ing] himself satisfied with who he is,” he assumes he has nothing to learn from Phaedrus, and especially nothing to learn about himself (50). Nonetheless, in his very pretense of not-loving, Lysias must conceal his intentions and “so transcend the level of his intentions” (50-51). His base love (Socrates twice calls homosexual love anti-natural) needs concealment, and the very act of concealment edifies, affords us “a glimmer of anamnesis,” a glimpse of something higher (51). “Talk about what it means to be human” is “implicit in the language of love,” the language of praise, because to praise someone or something is to say what he, she, or it is and to make a claim about what is love-worthy. But without self-knowledge, the lover cannot truly fulfill his own self-interest, even as he supposes himself to be aiming exactly at that, and cleverly.
In replying to Lysias’s speech as read to him by Phaedrus, Socrates veils himself, pulling his cloak over his head—”a visible icon of his irony” (55). Socrates feigns shame, “a kind of self-consciousness, mediated by one’s consciousness of how someone else would evaluate one’s deeds” and therefore a “paradigm” of “the complex reflexive nature of self-knowledge” (56). The reply itself refutes Lysias by denying that reason is merely instrumental, an art or technique; Socrates also denies that eros is simply a matter of bodily desire. “Socrates will argue that the hubris of reason which is philosophy is as natural as the striving for bodily beauty” (64). As Aristotle will write at the beginning of his Metaphysics, man wants to know. Philosophic dialectic has a “self-motion”: “the desire for satisfaction leads to the acquisition of theory, which in turn expands our vocabulary and conception of eros” because “in order to understand our desire we have to do more than think about ourselves as particular individuals” (66). Love leads us outside of ourselves, requires us to understand another; in that quest for understanding, love teaches us about ourselves, as well. This means that eros and logos, attraction and detachment, desire and moderation cannot easily be separated. To gain the object of our attraction we need to detach ourselves sufficiently to think about the nature of that object. “At the highest level reason is erotic, or eros rational” (67). “We cannot just let our desires run away with us; they need to be made reflective in a way that allows them to be measured by an answer about what it mean to be human” (68). Socrates’ threat to leave after his first, short speech, followed by his invocation of his daimonion‘s warning that he should not go, not only force Phaedrus to act as a lover would, begging Socrates to stay, but also suggest “the ascent of knowledge” from physical to rational desire, from the desire for carnal knowledge to the desire to know the nature of the beloved and finally the nature of human beings as such (72).
Griswold observes that Socrates claims that the several kinds of madness he describes in his long, second speech originate from the gods. “The overcoming of Lysias’ standpoint seems to require a religious premise” (75). But “the role of the gods in the fourth kind of madness is unconventional”—internal to the individual, rather like (one might add) Socrates’ daimonion. The three more traditional kinds of madness—prophetic, “telistic” or healing, and poetic—”serve to bridge the gap between the defective modern understanding of the phenomena [i.e. the analytic attempts to interpret nature] and a more archaic and philosophical conception” (77). The religious premise proves helpful here because it posits human dependence on higher powers, discouraging attempts to manipulate nature, to use it without understanding it. Without a belief in, and a longing for, what’s above oneself, one never comes to philosophy.
Socrates begins his discussion of the fourth kind of madness by considering the nature of the soul, the main characteristics of which are self-motion (a concept needed for any anti-materialist argument) and immortality. In making these claims, Socrates “reinfuses nature with myth,” discouraging the “reductive account of human beings”; he “wants to claim, after all, that moral intuition does tell us something true about things” (83). Griswold carefully denies that Socrates has claimed personal immortality of the soul, some kind of immortal joining of body and soul. Rather, “the notion of immortality is a component of the thesis that every human soul has by nature some understanding of the Truth. Intelligence does not inhabit an absurd world; there are eternal principles of intelligibility the understanding of which is an escape from our finitude.” (85) Self-motion then refers to the erotic, desiring feature of the soul; immortality refers to its capacity for in some way succeeding in achieving its erotic purpose. The soul is free not in the sense of being `autonomous’ or `creative’—claims foreign to Plato—but in the sense that it has the capacity to choose among the desires. “There is a natural fit between soul and Ideas” (87).
The myth of the soul as a combination of a charioteer and two horses implies that Socrates wants Lysias to begin to understand the soul not through the sort of direct introspection Descartes would commend but indirectly, through an image that shows how the soul has the nature of a moving object not a stable form, an Idea with a capital `I.’ “No one has ever had the experience of gazing directly into the immutable essence of man, for such an essence does not exist if there is no Idea of the soul” (89). The gods who, according to the myth, the souls `remember’ from their pre-earthly existence and choose to follow are “character types, not Ideas” (91). The soul has an idea—lower-case `i’—which means a nature, a shape. It isn’t one of the Beings; it longs for them, chooses to pursue them, organizing its life on earth around that chosen pursuit.
In the imagery of the charioteer and the horses, the charioteer needs the horses in order to move forward and upward (or, alternatively, to crash and burn). The soul is complex; its unity is “functional and teleological” more than structural (there is no natural physical connection between a charioteer and the horses, or even between the horses). “The principle of unity” of the soul is eros; consequently in Socrates’ imagery all parts of the soul have wings symbolic of longing, although that eros can be reasonable or unreasonable, depending upon the nature of the being to which they are attached. Reason, spiritedness or thumos, and the bodily desires (especially sexual desire) all strive for dominance but the hierarchy runs from reason to spiritedness to the bodily desires because there is a natural good for the soul.
As for the god, they have no need for erotic madness, “circulat[ing] through the heavens without paying any attention at all to human beings,” who are on their own (97). Our prayers go unanswered, although that is no reason to eschew prayer because prayer is a custom that directs our souls toward the things that orient it `up.’ “Since self-knowledge is the means for discovering what naturally satisfies desire, self-knowledge, the satisfaction of eros, and understanding one’s soul as a whole all come to the same thing. To be oneself one must know oneself. This is the secret the philosopher understands.” (98) Knowing ourselves means not only glimpsing the `inner man’ through mythic imagery but also “knowing ourselves as a part of a larger Whole, elements of which naturally attract and fulfill us when we understand them” (98). The physical gratification Lysias seeks is indeed desired by the soul, but only by one part of it. “What I `really’ want is to be satisfied as a whole” (99). But if I fail to choose such whole-souled satisfaction my life among all other souls which have so chosen becomes “a war of all against all” (99). Thomas Hobbes saw one part of the human condition, a not-inconsiderable one. “Man is to be understood primarily in terms of his ends” (101), and these are natural ends, not socially or historically evolved. Because there is a hierarchy in the soul, and a hierarchy of souls depending upon which element predominates, “a soul in one category will not see things in the same light as a soul in a different category” (103). Hence the need for rhetoric, for speech that tames and at least to some extent redirects wrongly-ordered souls.
The gods not only have a planet-like indifference to human strivings, they do not themselves strive. They theorize without effort. “Theorizing requires leisure and, in a sense, passivity; the gods do not do anything when they feast except look. No labor or art [techne] is required either to cultivate the food they eat or to get themselves to their food” because “Being appears to them as it is.” (104). They need no self-knowledge because their `selves’ simply see, with no impassioned disturbances to complicate that seeing, and no human-all-too-human `perspectivity.’ “Man is his own greatest obstacle in his efforts to know the truth,” a fact which makes self-knowledge “central for Socrates” (105). “The mind’s perfection is not to master, shape, make or alter what is but rather to be formed by it” (104). When Socrates in another dialogue suggests that philosophy involves learning how to die he means that eros yearns for timeless Being. But we only get glimpses of it. “It is as though we must simultaneously try to find what we `really’ desire and be conscious that we cannot find it, and to be satisfied with (or in) this state of perpetual dissatisfaction”—knowing our ignorance, desiring to overcome it, aware “that in this life such overcoming is impossible that defines the`best’ human life” (106). The verbal virtuosity of the rhetorician will never satisfy a fully human soul because “the highest form” of knowledge is not a logos but noetic insight or intellectual intuition (107). In the Phaedrus happiness and truth are bound together: “The experience of truth is the experience of spiritual well-being” (109). “The soul desires Being because Being nourishes it, and Being is desirable because it is intrinsically nourishing” (110). The soul’s self-motion goes toward or away from this true nourishment; this constitutes its “limited freedom” (111). “Self-knowledge is, in other words, intelligent self-motion” (111).
One aspect of intelligent self-motion is anamnesis—not-forgetting or recollection. The English word `recollection’ proves apt, inasmuch as anamnesis—”an activity, not a state, of the soul” (115)—does indeed re-collect our many sense perceptions, gathering them together by reasoning and putting them into their original natural order in our mind. Socrates’ emphasis on beauty in the Phaedrus makes sense in this light: “The fantastic power of Beauty to attract us is due to the wholeness with which Beauty fills the soul” (113). Love of the beautiful is the way to anamnesis for a soul like that of Phaedrus, with its love of beautiful speeches yet unenhanced by reasoning. “In anamnesis we are both recalled to a sense of our primordial status, our place in the cosmos as a while, and brought by means of lengthy questioning to rational insight into the forms of things” (113). And “in remembering the forms we become what we were” (113), namely beings both insightful and ignorant or limited. Griswold remarks that reasoning acts upon the sense perceptions our bodies provide; therefore, “the body is not simply an obstacle to contemplation” (114-115). Limited understanding of the Whole brings us to know ourselves as natural wholes, as bodies and souls. By reasoning, we form images, `re-mind’ ourselves, lead our soul to insights: “Socrates’ `erotic art’ is the dialectical rhetoric that uses the power of questioning to accomplish this end” (115-116). Socratic rhetoric, rational because genuinely erotic, surpasses the manipulative rhetoric of Lysias, leading Phaedrus away from his enticements in order to bring Phaedrus to his true self.
If the lover “come[s] to see the beloved as an image, and so as lacking some of the characteristics of the original” (119), then he will elevate and refine his own love, making it a great deal less silly. Although unlike the gods we cannot see the forms clearly, our glimpses of them suffice to show us that the universe is not “unintelligible, absurd, or fundamentally lacking form” (120). Griswold mentions that this reverses the treatment of eros seen in the writings of Sigmund Freud (and, one might add, Marx): “Stated very crudely, instead of explaining the desire for philosophy as a modification of sexual desire, Socrates explains sexual desire as a low manifestation of the desire for wisdom,” “not reducible to a desire for pleasure” (121).
This understanding of the soul has moral consequences. Self-knowledge causes us to `turn our souls around,’ away from the misleading images of public opinion and toward living your life with a different direction in mind. Phaedrus might turn away from a life of dilettantism and start thinking seriously. As for Lysias, the lovingly fake non-lover, if reoriented by anamnesis he would transfer “his own character-ideal to the beloved to whom he has taken a fancy, and then see himself in the beloved” (126). By `idealizing’ or `divinizing’ the beloved in his imagination, the Socratic lover externalizes himself, “creating for himself a route to self-knowledge” (126). No longer distracted, much less ruled by the bad horse, his lover’s soul now benefits itself and the beloved under the auspices of the forms. “When all is said and done, what the lover really wants is himself as he would like to be: himself fulfilled, whole, perfected, godlike”—”to be what he truly is” (128). This is not the love of a unique individual, `warts and all’; nor is it Christian agape, the love of a person as a creature of God regardless of his particular qualities. “Socrates’ lover and beloved love each other so as to love themselves, not in a selfish way, but in a way that helps the other to love himself qua whole and fulfilling his nature” (129).
A serious problem remains: how much of what the lover imagines is true, how much false? How can he distinguish what he sees to be from what he falsely makes to be? This is where moderation comes in, not by denying all bodily desires—this would result in “the eventual termination of the human species”—but perhaps the denial of “pederastic sexual relations (which are `unnatural’; 251a1, 254b1) and sex indulged in for pleasure alone are to be rejected completely” (135). The elimination of such uncontrollable bodily lust will enable the mind to clear itself sufficiently for not only anamnesis but for analysis, for separation or division, for the consistent application of the principle of non-contradiction which in turn eliminates some falsehood from the images we form in our minds. “Knowledge of eros is finally knowledge of being intermediate or… `in between’ wisdom and ignorance, Beauty and ugliness” 136). The Bible teaches humility by contrasting Creator with created; philosophy teaches moderation by keeping us mindful of how much we know we do not know.
Griswold next turns to a further examination of Socratic myth-making and thus to rhetoric, which stands in need of myths. Does the myth exemplify philosophic logos? What is the logos appropriate to self-knowledge?
Platonic myths express meaning symbolically and thus require interpretation. A logos, by contrast, centers on argument and accounts of actions and other facts. “But as the Phaedrus shows, the distinction in question is not absolute either substantively or terminologically,” inasmuch as Socrates’ speeches use myths in such a way as to invite logical interpretation. Myths can lead to self-knowledge because Phaedrus is mistaken in treating them as mere imaginary stories. In Socrates’ telling, myths open the soul of the listener to reason. For example, the myth of the soul’s immortality, interpreted, means “the capacity of a mind that exists in time to think what is eternal” (145). “Correspondingly, the `punishment’ a person undergoes for having lived a nonphilosophic life is simply the quality of that one life–a life devoid of true happiness, satisfaction, love” (145). Even if the soul does not actually survive the death of the body, the myth suggests the thought that it isn’t reducible to the body. Mythic language “articulat[es] our experience of desire and love” (147). It also expresses recognition of who we “might become at our best” (147). It does this by transposing “the language that describes objects experienced through the senses to objects not accessible to the senses” (148). By mythic imagery, metaphor, and symbolism “the world revealed by the senses is transposed to the inner world of the soul” in a way that abstract propositions and arguments cannot emulate (148). Not only does this guard us from reductionist materialism, it also guards us from `idealist’ vaporings. “Even as it calls for philosophical reflection, a Platonic myth keeps the phenomenon of human experience in front of us” (148).
Good rhetoric, including mythology, “conveys the truth” by enabling each soul to understand as much of the truth symbolized or pictured in the myth as that soul can find. In the second half of the Phaedrus dialogue replaces monologue, logos replaces mythmaking. If the first, myth-centered half of the Phaedrus opens Phaedrus’s soul to eros by means of imagery, the second, logos-centered, dialogic half teaches Phaedrus rhetoric as art, its nonloving side. The artist qua artist uses his intellect to produce something, takes a determinate sequence of steps toward that end, operates on elements by dividing and collecting them as a means toward that end; these are teachable procedures or methods. The philosophic dialogue, erotic in that it loves wisdom, also displays technical expertise. The “sober and uninspired” “talk about talking” in this section mirrors the first half (163). “This is the key to the Phaedrus’ unity” (164). The soul’s eroticism needs the moral counterweight of moderation but also the intellectual counterweight of dialectic. To avoid self-deception, the rhetorician “must know the truth” (170).
We test our notions by talking about them with others. A philosopher “must create a context of disagreement for himself” (172) because “it is dangerous for a philosopher to talk to himself only” (173). For philosophic purposes, dialogue is the best form of rhetoric, with its built-in disagreement, the way it requires the talkers to clarify distinctions, define their terms, kick the proverbial tires on one another’s assertions by questioning and counter-argument. This procedure “alone does not, unfortunately, resolve the critical problem of distinguishing between intuition of Beings and intuition governed by opinion, even if the techne [art] is helpful in training the mind to make some steps in solving the problem” (176). Analysis or division by itself misses what the first half of the dialogue supplies: glimpses of “the whole of nature” (185), including soul, life itself in its movement. The rhetorical art of dialectic aims at anamnesis but is not anamnesis, as indeed rhetoric itself consists of more than analysis but of a sense of the live audience, of timing, of taste. Self-knowledge understood analytically results in ‘psychology’—understand a soul’s “character traits” that the psychologist can then classify with regard to a typology of souls (194). But this doesn’t tell you what the soul aims at, or its relation to nature as a whole.
Theuth and Thamos represent these opposing but also potentially complementary approaches to self-knowledge. Theuth represents “the autonomy of the arts,” Thamos “the conservative telos to which they must be subjected” in “that ancient and pious society, Egypt” (202-203). With characteristic irony, Socrates’ story is itself an invention of his own, and of course “Egypt would have been a far less hospitable home for Socrates than was Athens” (204). In a further paradox, the art of writing innately leans away from flexibility and innovation, toward unquestioning acceptance; it might be that Thamos prefers rather more scope for his own judgment and action than strict adherence to writings, particularly laws, would allow, but Griswold does not suggest that. Socrates clearly thinks so, foreseeing the “the reduction of philosophy to a merely intellectual business, devoid of the recollective insight into truth and so of the madness of eros” (211). Writing’s “dangerous tendency to drug living thought” shows itself in Phaedrus himself (213). If Socrates needs live-minded interlocutors, can writing help, or only hinder?
Plato’s dialogues themselves answer that question. By their very character they “recant their authority as written in order to return the reader to the life of ensouled discourse” (225). These three scholarly commentaries on the Phaedrus do that, as well.
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