After procrastinating on my assigned readings for about two months, I finally got around to reading Phaedrus.

There is much to say about Phaedrus. For one, it houses Plato's famous Chariot Analogy. I always find it fascinating when Plato, speaking through Socrates, presents classical Greek myths and integrate them with his philosophy. This dialogue also serves as a fantastic companion to his Symposium, especially on the topic of Eros. Eventually, I will get around to reading that one—ideally before my final.

That said, I am rating this text lower because of the detailed description and discussion of pederasty. Although, and this will be something I will look into, Plato's description of the young boy in love involves such a similar dynamic to that of Lacan's mirror stage that I cannot help but wonder what its implications are.

3/5

,,Aj, aj, a ty gałganie, a toś znalazł sposób na moją ciekawość literacką"

The Phaedrus was not one of the dialogues we read in my Plato seminar in grad school, so I thought I'd finally tackle it. I didn't like it much. I'm guessing that that might be the influence of my particular professor, but I'm not sure.

Some of the other goodreads reviews are very well-written and do a nice job of analyzing the dialogue. Many highly recommend it.

The dialogue is a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus out for a walk on a hot summer afternoon. They take shelter in a cool spot and discuss love and rhetoric.

The dialogue begins playfully and flirtatiously, and I enjoyed the discussions of same-sex love which is often part of the cultural milieu in Plato's dialogues, but is explicitly discussed here.

Socrates argues at one point that lovers must be avoided and then turns around and argues the exact opposite, which then leads into the real topic of the dialogue -- rhetoric and how it can be used to argue most anything and to deceive people from the truth. A number of other topics appear, including the immortality of the soul and its make-up and even interesting comments on divine possession, revelation, and religious practice (I wrote an essay on Socrates on this topic in grad school).

There is good and important information here for student of Socrates/Plato, however I didn't find it, overall, as engaging (both as literature and philosophical treatise) as many of Plato's other works.

Spoiler alert: This book is not about a "philosophy of love" as many reviewers seem to believe. As every dream has its manifest content (a storyline) that masks a latent content (the suppressed, unconscious emotions that bubble into our semi-conscious REM sleep), Socrates' discourse on the nature of love thinly masks the true subject of this dialogue: bullshit, how to produce it, and how to recognize it. For the reader, his dialectical approach gives us a hint about how to resist it.

With self-deprecating charm -- true to form -- Socrates schools beautiful young Phaedrus on his own susceptibility to bullshit, alternately praising Phaedrus's current object of infatuation, the silver-tongued rhetor Lysias, and ruthlessly dismantling the rhetorical artifices of Lysias' manufacture.

This excellent translation by Christopher Rowe is not only accessible to the reader not familiar (or terribly comfortable) with the Socratic dialogs, but manages, too, to emphasize Socrates' sharp wit, good humor, and gentleness of pedagogy. Rowe's scholarly introduction provides context and background making clear the significance of this work.

It is a testament to Plato -- an early generation child and devotee of alphabetic literacy -- that he takes pains to accurately convey to us Socrates' belief that writing would sap the intelligence of the Athenian youth, making them both less knowledgeable about the universal precepts of logic, and less inclined to engage in a dialectic with thought externalized and made permanent.

Plato is RIDICULOUS. In all the best ways. I'm sort of inclined to agree with a friend who said that if you're trying to sort out the Socrates from the Plato, a pretty good indicator for the Socrates is the concentration of dirty jokes. The Phaedrus is rife with them. It actually opens with Lysias arguing for hookup culture. That makes the subtle little ways that Socrates pulls out the rug from under you all the more delicious.e

قرأتها في مكتبة الجامعة. محاورة سيئة إلى حد كبير، وإن كنت متفق مع جزئية كون المحب غير مالك زمام عقله، وأن اللا - محب يكون أكثر قبولًا. لكن المشكلة أن اللا- محب يعيش حياته في الغالب مثل جماد. ليس هذا هو الحل بالتأكيد. لم لا يوجد حبًا عقلانيًا؟ كالحب الذي اقترحه فروم مثلًا؟
يصور أفلاطون الحب أنه قوة تتنازعها سلطتين، العقل واللذة، أو حسب مجازه: عربة يجرها حصانين، وإن زادت سلطة أحدهم على الآخر تنقلب العربة، وبأن الحب علاقة يحكمها الكون والفساد أو مبدأ الحب والكره الذي لا أذكر من قال به. عموما هي محاورة سيئة ويغلب عليها التشتت وعدم الوضوح والتطرف الشديد.

مثال حب الغلمان كان مجرد مثل، لا كما فهمت مسبقًا من كتب التاريخ والفلسفة والجمال

Plato's dialogues take on greater depth and resonance the more of them one reads. Socrates' character in them remains much the same: seemingly diffident, almost self-effacing, as he asks a series of questions that gradually reveal unstated assumptions on the part of the person with whom he is speaking. What changes from one dialogue to the next is the particular area of interest that a dialogue engages, and the character of the person or people whom Socrates engages in conversation. In the case of Phaedrus, Socrates' co-respondent is, unsurprisingly, Phaedrus -- a young man who is basically a person of good will, someone whom Socrates likes and trusts. Yet Phaedrus is a bit too much in love with artful rhetoric for its own sake; he praises a sophistical speech by one Lysias. Socrates demolishes Lysias' unethical arguments with ease, and then proceeds to lead Phaedrus into an in-depth discussion of what rhetoric is. In contrast with Gorgias, an earlier dialogue in which Socrates argued that all rhetoric is basically window-dressing for bad ideas, Phaedrus offers a more nuanced argument: that because rhetoric increases the persuasive power of an idea, it is all the more important that people of good will use the power of rhetoric to lend additional force to arguments that are ethical and moral. Socrates makes his point well, and it is a point that people of this era cannot help but appreciate: If you persuade one person that a donkey is a horse, that is a misfortune for one person. If, on the other hand, you persuade an entire society that donkeys are horses, it can be an entire nation's tragedy. The history of the 20th century, from Hitler and Stalin through Slobodan Milosevic and the architects of the Rwandan genocide, demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Socrates' ideas about rhetoric only too well.

“Phaedrus” is structured as a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus that explores the nature of love, provides a critical perspective on rhetoric and communications, and insights into the cultural and intellectual context of ancient Greece. With its philosophical depth, engaging style, as well as historical significance, it is a valuable addition to anyone’s reading list.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss love and rhetoric. While it is true that a big chunk of the dialog is about love, the love speeches are really a setup for the final conversation on rhetoric. The love speeches become types of rhetoric that Socrates and Phaedrus then discuss to come to some conclusions about rhetoric.

A big takeaway: Rhetoric, to be truly effective and true and beautiful, requires the rhetorician to know his audience and the nature of the individuals that make up his audience. This means love and relationships are essential to rhetoric. This means we cannot assume a robot-like similarity between all humans. The soul, as Socrates concludes, is as complex as the human body and therefore requires complexity in the approach to communicate to it.

Much to contemplate here and reconsider as I re-read this in the future.

I’m making my way though Plato’s collected dialogues – and there are quite a few of them. All the same, I’m surprised by how many I’ve read before. I’m going to add some comments about the individual ones as I go through them and maybe something overall on them as a collection once I’ve finished.

It would be easy to say this dialogue is about love, except that the Phaedrus isn’t actually about love alone, but also about the power of rhetoric and why we need to be aware of that power. One of the things I’ve particularly noticed in this read through of the dialogues is how attracted Socrates is to pretty young men. In one of the dialogues he even mentions how tongue-tied he starts off being while talking to a particularly beautiful young man. And sometimes it is fairly obvious that he is showing off in front of them. This presents something of a counter-theme to the stated aim of many of these dialogues, that beauty is more than just skin deep and that sexual attraction alone isn’t to be trusted.

I guess in some ways what is being discussed in relation to love is a bit like choosing someone to be your mentor, even if at least part of that relationship is also going to be sexual. The dialogue starts with Phaedrus going to tell Socrates of something he had read on the nature of love written by Lysias. Now, Socrates stops him, because he can see the speech is basically sticking out of his pocket and so he tells him to read it to him. This is interesting given what is said later about the power of memory and the negative aspects of written texts.

Lysias’ speech says that you should enter into a relationship with someone who doesn’t love you, since love comes with lots of problems – not least of which being jealousy – and so you might be better off with someone who just wants to have sex with you as they are likely to have your best interests at heart and will not try to necessarily keep you from mixing with other people. A disinterested lover is therefore likely to be a better mentor, whereas a passionate lover might ultimately do you harm.

Socrates listens to this and then says that he was so swept along by how involved Phaedrus was in his reading of the speech that it was all a bit contagious. Which is interesting for the second theme of this dialogue – on rhetoric – since it is that kind of contagion that ultimately Socrates is going to want to overcome. But he then says he could do a better speech on the same theme, but before starting he covers his head, I think basically out of shame and embarrassment since he is going to be swept along by the muses in what he is saying. In a sense this sort of thing sounds like it is Socrates being ironic and even a little sarcastic – and I’m sure it is that too – but I also started to wonder if this wasn’t a bit like watching science fiction films while knowing a little of physics. You know, like in Star Wars where people zap off at light speed across the universe, but everyone is still in the same time relative to each other. If you worry about the physics of the film, you’ll ruin your enjoyment of the film – but if you don’t worry about it, then you have to sort of pretend to remain dumber than you necessarily are. The solution being to worry about the physics after you’ve enjoyed the film, perhaps... Although, as someone who hasn’t seen a Star Wars film since the second one (which was probably numbered episode 7 or something stupid like that), the other option is, of course, to not bother watching them at all. Which I guess is ultimately Socrates’ point and one I've basically followed by default.

In Socrates’ first speech he is also arguing that you are better off with a non-lover – since being in love is a kind of madness and since a lover wants their own pleasure from the object of their love, that is unlikely to involve them worrying too much about what is bests for the young man. In fact, it is likely to have pretty bad consequences for the young man, since the lover will be moulding them into something that will best suit their own passions. A non-lover, on the other hand, is more likely to be a guide in the young man’s life and so ought to be chosen for those reasons.

Except, love is basically a god and so Socrates, in making this speech against love, has just blasphemed – the little ghost guy that tells him when he made some sort of blunder tells him this before he can leave, and so he now has to make another speech to make amends. And so, this time his focus is on the benefits of love. In this Socrates talks of how the particular beauty of the young man acts as a kind of stepping stone towards grasping the truth of the form of the beautiful – and this is realised in the movement from the particular (the beauty of the boy) to the universal (beauty per se) - or from the concrete realisation of beauty in the young boy, to the abstract (and therefore more true) nature of beauty as a form. To achieve ‘true’ love, the lover and the boy need to be swept along by desire so as to be nearly overcome by it, but to ultimately not give into that desire – that is, I guess, they show that their desire for knowledge and truth about beauty is stronger than the baser emotions involved in consuming and consummating their physical desire.

So, to recap a little – Phaedrus reads a speech by Lysias to Socrates, Socrates first tries to improve this speech, by improving upon its rhetorical form, but then has to give another version of the speech to not just fix up its form, but also the problems with its content. We then come to a discussion on the nature of rhetoric itself – or rather, of writing. Socrates sees writing as a problem, and it is important in that context to remember that he, a bit like Jesus, never wrote anything, but spent his life in discussions with people. All the same, as I said at the start, it is interesting that he demanded a reading of the first speech, rather than a recollection of it.

Socrates believed discussion was far superior to writing since if you don’t understand something said by someone you are talking to, you can ask them a question – and asking questions is certainly Socrates’ thing. But with a book it has the problem of only being able to tell you the same thing over and over again. And as I said before, we can too easily get swept along by the beauty of a speech, and miss the fact that perhaps nothing worthwhile is being said.

I noticed this particularly this week, after the Labor Party here in Australia lost the election – an election it had been decided by everyone for years it would be impossible for the ALP to lose. Anyway, one of their ex-politicians put a video online of him very passionately saying things needed to change. He didn’t say which things needed to change, how they needed to change, how those changes might make it more likely for the ALP to win the next election – none of that – just that things needed to change. He did, however, say this with remarkable force and conviction, so much so that I'm quite sure he was terribly, terribly sincere, and his little video has received 16,500 views. It is just that, despite the depth of his sincerity, I'm not sure I could tell you what he is being sincere about.

Of course, the problem with writing isn’t just that you can’t ask the written text questions – well, you can, it’s just you can’t expect answers. Rather, the real problem with written texts for Socrates is the impact they have on memory. Writing is often considered to be an ‘aid’ to memory – but for Socrates, it is likely to be the exact opposite. Whereas before writing you had to remember by-heart things you wanted to ‘take with you’, with writing you can always refer back to the text. The problem is, that having something ‘in your heart’ isn’t quite the same as having something that you can ‘look up’.

For a long time I tried to learn poetry by heart, and for pretty much the same reason Socrates is saying here. I highly recommend it, by the way – you can play with poems you know by heart in ways it is harder to play with them if you have to track them down and read over again. And that does make a difference. You understand poems more once you have committed them to memory – Part of me thinks that should sound obvious, but another part of me suspects many people might not really believe it.

This is one of the classic dialogues – perhaps one of the top ten – a couple of things I’ve read about it talk about how it is one of Plato’s homosexual dialogues – which is, of course, a bit stupid – given that homosexuality as we think of it now wasn’t really what the Ancient Greeks understood by the idea of love (or even sex) between a man and a ‘boy’. We find it impossible to understand the past other than through the lens of our present prejudices. As such, this book is a good curative for that.

Previously considered a lesser work by Plato, but more recently considered important because of Derrida. The text is about writing and oral communication and their role in telling the truth. The dialogue very cleverly intersperses the difference between true and false love with the difference between true and false rhetoric. In reading this, it helps to understand the opposition between Socrates and the sophists that pervades most of the other Platonic dialogues, but the Phaedrus can stand alone.
The Phaedrus highlights the irony of Plato having a written dialogue that criticizes whether writing can tell the truth. This irony appears to cut at the very core of the use of Plato's writings and the relationship between Socrates and the sophists.

Read for class. Second work by Plato I've read this year. I don't know if Socrates was really the way Plato characterizes him, but if he was, it's no wonder they wanted to poison him lol.

Ugh, these philosophers think they're so cool. It's HIGHLY annoying.