Phaedrus

Overview

The Phaedrus is about a hundred pages and only two people are in it. It is also the only dialogue set outside the city walls, and Plato makes a great deal of that. Socrates, who says elsewhere that he learns nothing from trees, is lured out along the Ilissus by the promise of a speech, takes off his sandals to walk in the stream, lies down under a plane tree in the heat of noon, and delivers an uncharacteristic description of the place: the chaste-tree in flower, the cicadas, the spring sacred to a nymph. The setting is not decoration. The dialogue is about being carried away, and it begins by carrying Socrates out of his habits.

Structurally it is famously two-part, and readers have argued since antiquity about whether it is one dialogue or two stapled together. The first half is three speeches about love. The second is a technical discussion of rhetoric that ends in a myth about writing. Plato signals the connection himself: all three speeches were about persuading a boy, so the question of what makes a speech good has been present from the first page.

It is also one of the most beautiful things Plato wrote, and he knows it. The recantation is poetry, and the dialogue closes by criticising exactly the kind of composed set-piece it has just performed.

The argument

The speech of Lysias (227 to 234). Phaedrus has a copy under his cloak and pretends he does not. The speech is a clever exercise: a man who does not love the boy he is addressing argues that a non-lover makes the better partner, since a lover is unstable, jealous, possessive, and will regret everything once the passion cools, while a non-lover acts by choice and can be counted on. Socrates listens, praises the rhythm, and says the content is thin and repetitive.

Socrates’ first speech (237 to 241). Challenged to do better, he covers his head in embarrassment and gives the same case properly. He begins where Lysias should have, with a definition: love is a kind of desire that has overpowered judgement and drives toward the pleasure of beauty. From that he derives, methodically, every harm the lover does, keeping the beloved weak, ignorant and isolated so as to keep him. He stops abruptly, refusing to go on to the praise of the non-lover.

The palinode (243 to 257). His daimonion has checked him. He has said something blasphemous about a god, and like the poet Stesichorus, who was blinded for slandering Helen and recovered his sight by writing a recantation, he must take it back.

He begins by denying the premise both earlier speeches assumed, that madness is simply a defect. Four kinds are gifts: prophecy, the madness of ritual purification, poetic inspiration, and love. To show what the fourth is, he must say what a soul is, and he offers a proof that soul is immortal because it is self-moving and therefore uncaused.

Then the image. A soul is a charioteer with two winged horses, one noble and obedient, one crooked and violent. The gods’ teams are perfectly matched and ride up the vault of heaven to look out on what truly is: justice, moderation and knowledge, in the place beyond the sky. Human teams struggle, the bad horse drags them down, and they see only glimpses before the wings fall away and they sink into bodies. What a person saw determines what kind of life they are born into, from philosopher at the top to tyrant at the bottom, and the cycle takes ten thousand years, shortened to three thousand for one who chooses the philosophical life three times over.

Beauty is the point where this becomes urgent. Of everything the soul saw, only beauty has a clear image here, so the sight of a beautiful person strikes the soul with recollection, the stumps of the wings begin to swell and itch and hurt, and the result looks like a disease. Socrates describes the physical symptoms at length and with some amusement. The struggle between the horses is then played out as a story about how a lover behaves, and the best outcome is a shared life in which both are restrained, both grow wings, and both are better than they could have been alone.

Rhetoric (257 to 279). The tone drops back to conversation. Is speech-writing shameful? Only bad speech-writing. What makes it bad? Socrates argues that a real art of speaking requires knowing the truth about the subject, being able to divide it correctly, collecting particulars under a single form and cutting at the natural joints, and, above all, knowing the kinds of souls in the audience and which kinds of speech move which. The handbooks of the professionals, he says, teach the preliminaries of an art and call them the art.

Finally, the myth of Theuth and Thamus. The Egyptian god Theuth presents writing to the king as a cure for forgetfulness; the king replies that it is a recipe for reminding, not for memory, and will give people the appearance of wisdom without the reality. Socrates adds his own objections: a written text says the same thing to everyone, cannot defend itself, and drifts to readers it was never meant for. The serious person plants words in a suitable soul, where they can answer back. Then he prays to Pan for beauty within, and they go.

How to read it

Read the Symposium first if you can. The two dialogues on love are usually taught together, and the Phaedrus is far richer if you have Diotima’s ladder in mind when the charioteer appears.

Read the three speeches as a set and compare their openings. Lysias starts in the middle of nowhere, Socrates starts with a definition, and the palinode starts with a claim about the soul. The dialogue is showing you what it later says.

Take the chariot slowly and do not hurry to decode it. Plato calls it a likeness offered because the truth about soul would take a god to tell. The two horses are not a tidy allegory of reason and appetite, and the middle term matters.

Watch the joke Plato is playing on himself. A written dialogue argues that writing cannot teach, delivered by a man who wrote nothing, composed by the greatest prose writer of the age. Whether the criticism includes the dialogues themselves is a serious question, and the Seventh Letter, if it is genuine, says something similar.

The common misreading is to take the palinode as Plato’s settled view that passion is good after all. The speech is still a speech, delivered for a purpose to a particular young man who is in love with speeches, and the second half of the dialogue is about exactly that.

Questions it raises

• Are the two halves one dialogue? What does the account of love need from the account of rhetoric, and the other way around?
• Socrates says the greatest goods come through madness. Is that compatible with anything else he says about the rule of reason?
• Why is beauty the only form with a visible copy? Does the argument require that, or does Plato simply observe it?
• If the good horse and the bad horse are both part of the soul, who is the charioteer?
• Writing is said to give the appearance of wisdom and to be unable to defend itself. Does that apply to the Phaedrus?
• A real art of speaking would require knowing which speeches move which souls. Is that possible, and if it were, would it be rhetoric or manipulation?