lysias is an opp

Je t'adore Platon mais dis à ton pote Socrate d'arrêter de parler pour rien dire

Entre los diálogos platónicos existe uno que es curioso por dos razones a resaltar: la cantidad de interlocutores es mínima, por un lado, y, por el otro, la variedad de los temas que desarrolla es tal que no puede clasificarse ninguno de los mismos como el predominante.

tEs decir que, en primer lugar, quienes conversan son dos personajes solamente: Sócrates y Fedro (lo cual se podría considerar como una rareza al comparar las distintas obras platónicas). Y, en segundo lugar, al continuar la costumbre de disponer subtítulos indicativos del eje central a las obras, en este caso particular sería tarea complicada. Por eso algunos traductores han optado por una solución arbitraria, y le pusieron «Fedro o...» del amor (en la edición de Gabriel Silva Rincón), de lo bello y lo ético (en la traducción de García Bacca). Mientras que otros, quizá por no querer añadir nada al original, sólo toman en cuenta el título (en la edición de Gredos).

tPero el punto sigue siendo el mismo: si nos preguntaran sobre qué se habla en el Fedro no podríamos decir «sobre esto», sino que, por rigor, habría que aclarar «sobre esto, aquello y lo otro». O, en otras palabras, sobre el amor aparente y el verdadero, las distintas locuras que aquejan al hombre, la trascendencia del alma, la oralidad y la escritura y los tipos retórica detrás de ambas.

1. Primer discurso de Lisias

tFedro, como entusiasta de los discursos, queda gratamente sorprendido y admirado por el que le transmitió Lisias, sobre la conveniencia de entregarse al hombre desapasionado. En el mismo se presentan distintas razones por las cuales el hombre enamorado sólo provoca perjuicios al amado. Secuencialmente son éstas:

a) «los enamorados se arrepienten luego de verse satisfechos» (231a)
b) «pueden sacrificar sus antiguos amores por los nuevos» (231c)
c) «tienen espíritu enfermo y falta de buen sentido» (231d)
d) «cualquier cosa les enoja y creen que todo se hace para perjudicarlos» (232c)
e) «alejan a todos de su amado, dejándoles sin amigos» (232d)
f) «se enamoran del cuerpo antes que del alma, y no puede asegurarse si su amistad debe sobrevivir a la satisfacción de su deseo» (232e)
g) «el amor se debe compadecer, no envidiar» (233b)
h) «en vez de dañarnos, ayudarnos mutuamente» (234c)

tLisias, pues, parte de una descripción del amor que se da efectivamente entre la mayoría de los hombres, aunque no lo reconozca ni lo anuncie así él mismo. De modo que, las razones (de la «a» hasta la «h») aducidas para mostrar las consecuencias contraproducentes para el amado y el propio amante, son una enumeración relacionada única y exclusivamente con el amor aparente, es decir, aquél que se muestra como tal pero que no necesariamente es tal.

tAquél «amor» egoísta, que busca meramente la satisfacción de los propios deseos (232e), a los cuales permanece esclavo, dominado totalmente por los mismos. Aquél «amor» que se enoja por cualquier cosa, por trivial que sea, y que ve enemigos por todas partes (232c); hasta el punto de aislarse de todos y de todo (232d), dejando al amante y al amado encerrados en sí mismos como en la peor cárcel, queriendo abandonarse mutuamente pero sin poder hacerlo, por la mutua dependencia ya establecida. Aquél «amor» profundamente enfermo, que le desgarra el buen sentido al hombre (231d), hasta el punto en que no valora a nadie realmente, pudiendo sacrificar a todos sus antiguos amados por sólo alabar el capricho del más reciente (231c). Aquél «amor» tiránico por naturaleza (al ser esclavo del deseo) y por finalidad (corromper al amado para tenerle controlado), que lo quiere todo a cualquier costo, incluso si le despoja al hombre de lo mejor que tiene... Porque, en fin, dicho «amor» sólo vela por el cuerpo (del amante que quiere satisfacerse y del amado que puede dar placer), y no aprecia el alma (de ninguno de los dos), de modo que es tan inestable que no se puede asegurar que pueda darse amistad alguna luego de que el deseo haya sido apaciguado (232e). Un amor que, más que envidia, sólo debe compadecerse (233b), pues provoca la degradación absoluta de quienes se involucran en el mismo.

tEse no es el amor que merecemos, nos dice Lisias, precediendo incluso a Sócrates, que en otros términos y de forma más extensa, llegará al mismo punto. No debemos entregarnos, pues, a un amor tiránico donde sólo nos hacemos daño, sino a uno donde nos ayudemos mutuamente (234c). Pero sobre éste otro, cuál es y cuáles son sus características, Lisias guarda silencio.

2. Primer discurso de Sócrates

tValga aclarar desde el comienzo que, el primer monólogo de Sócrates, sólo es un re-planteamiento de lo ya dicho por Lisias en su escrito (236b). De modo que no representa su postura al respecto (el amor) ni mucho menos.

tLa cuestión es que, apenas terminó Fedro de leer en voz alta el discurso de Lisias, le planteó Sócrates...

El resto del escrito se encuentra en mi blog: https://jsaaopinionpersonal.wordpress...

I am embarrassed to admit - this is the first book by Plato that I have ever read (inspired by reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). Phaedrus (actually Socrates) is excellent - clever, sophisticated, and to a certain extent even humorous. Now I need to read Plato's Republic...

Central to the Phaedrus are three speeches on the topic of erotic love (eros) in the context of the erastes-eromenos relationship: the first purportedly by the rhetorician Lysias, delivered here from memory by Phaedrus, and the other two conjured extemporaneously by Socrates. Accordingly, the dialogue is concerned with both the craft of rhetoric and the value of eros, with Lysias’s speech denigrating the latter on account of its irrationality and destructive potential, and Socrates coming to its defense by portraying it as a divine madness, superior to human rationality, which can awaken within the soul of lover and beloved alike a recollection of transcendental truth and beauty, elevating them to philosophic heights unattainable by mere reason. The insistence of Socrates that rhetoric, to be anything more than an “experiential knack” or a conjuring trick, must serve the cause of philosophy, and that the simplest path to moving the souls of an audience with an effective speech is to try to tell the truth, echo the sentiments expressed in the Gorgias.

Phaedrus begins the dialogue by reciting a speech of Lysias, in which the latter argues that a young eromenos should gratify a non-lover rather than a lover on the grounds that a lover is motivated by fickle and irrational passion rather than by reason, and is thus liable to exhibit erratic and controlling behavior that harms both parties and makes a public spectacle of them. Socrates, initially taking issue only with the speech’s lack of rhetorical virtuosity, expands upon the main thrust of Lysias’s arguments with a speech of his own, identifying eros as a vice analogous to gluttony in the sense that both involve the loss of self-control and the captivity of reason to desire: in the case of gluttony, the desire for food, and in that of eros, the desire to take pleasure in beauty. A non-lover is preferable to a lover, says Socrates, because his rationality and self-control will ensure that his actions are motivated by what is best for the moral and intellectual development of the eromenos rather than a selfish desire for pleasure.

It is just as Socrates is finishing this second, supplementary oration that the most memorable portion of the dialogue begins. Suddenly seized by divine inspiration, and regretful of his participation in the denigration of Eros—who is, after all, a god—Socrates launches into a third speech in praise of love. Eros may be irrational, he concedes, but not every form of irrationality is inferior to reason. The Pythia sets aside her own reason when she transmits the oracles of Apollo, but her “madness” proves truer than the wisdom of men. Likewise, a poet who attempts to compose in a purely “logical” manner will never reach the heights of those lifted out of their senses by the muses. Eros is a “divine madness” of this fashion; and to elaborate on this point, Socrates presents his celebrated allegory of the soul as a charioteer.

The soul, he says, is like a winged chariot pulled by two horses. One horse is spiritual in nature, desirous of goodness and truth, amenable to reason, conducive to self-mastery, and obedient to verbal commands without the need of rein or whip. The second is corporeal, violent, passionate, and sensuous, requiring forceful restraint. The spiritual horse would carry us upward, toward the transcendent, following the path of the gods, while the corporeal horse would drag us down from the heavens into the mud of mortal embodiment. The gods ascend in their own chariots to their divine banquet in the realm of “pure being” above heaven itself: first comes Zeus, the king of the gods, followed by eleven “squadrons” of lesser gods; and trailing these lesser gods in turn is a procession of immortal souls. While for the gods this ascent is an easy one, since both of their horses are good and obedient, our own souls have to struggle with the wild horse. Some souls manage to soar above the rim of heaven, enjoying a sustained vision of the ideal unity of all things; others get only a few brief glimpses of pure being, popping their heads intermittently above the clouds; others still swerve about in lower climes, crashing into one another before plummeting to earth. Whatever heights they have reached, souls are inevitably dragged down when the driver loses control of the unruly horse, and this results in mortal life. Every human being embodies a soul that had at least some glimpse of the realm of pure being: this explains our ability to see the ideal unity behind the multiplicity of particular objects. But whatever type of person one becomes is dependent upon how clear and sustained a vision one had of the highest heaven. The highest-reaching souls become philosophers (naturally), followed in descending order by law-abiding kings and commanders, politicians and businessmen, athletes, priests, poets, artisans and farmers, sophists and demagogues, and last—and least—by tyrants. Most souls are embodied once every thousand years for ten cycles, with intermittent periods of reward and punishment; and it is only after ten thousand years that a soul can return to the height from which it fell. Philosophers are an exception: any soul who lives a philosophical life three times in succession will regain its wings and take flight again.

Because the wings of the soul are nourished by the contemplation of ideal being, our hope for redemption depends upon our ability to recall, within mortal life, our soul’s primordial vision of the transcendent. And this recollection is the “madness” of the lover: what the lover sees in the ephemeral beauty of the beloved reminds him of the true beauty from which he has fallen. While a lesser soul is moved only to sate worldly appetites, paying no mind to its true origin and destiny, the soul of the lover, reminded of its heavenly home, longs to take to the air once again. “His wings begin to grow and he wants to take to the air on his new plumage, but he cannot; like a bird he looks upwards, and because he ignores what is down here, he is accused of behaving like a madman.” Far from being subrational, as Lysias suggests, the lover sees what is real, which makes him appear mad to those who do not. Eros is only a supposed liability in earthly life because it presents us with a ladder that would take us out of earthly life altogether, all the way up to the highest heaven.

The erastes then tries to cultivate within the eromenos the qualities of whichever god he followed in the pre-mortal procession, awakening within the latter a reciprocal love that, when channeled towards philosophy, allows both souls to “gain their wings together” in due time.

The dialogue again shifts to the topic of rhetoric, and focuses on the question of whether writing or speech is better for the one who receives it. Socrates, arguing that a living teacher will always be superior to the written word, closes out the Phaedrus by roasting every Goodreads user:

“'Because [students of writing] will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.’”

Ce texte a été écrit par Platon il y a vingt-cinq siècles. C'est un dialogue, sans doute imaginaire, entre Socrate, qui fut l'un de ses maîtres dans sa jeunesse, et qu'il fait largement intervenir dans ses œuvres, et Phèdre, un jeune homme de la noblesse Athénienne qui le fréquente. Le prétexte de cette causerie, c'est une promenade en dehors de la ville, où Phèdre entraine Socrate après l'avoir appâté par son enthousiasme à l'idée de lui faire entendre un discours qui l'a enchanté. Ce discours, composé par Lysias, est la plaidoirie d'un homme à celui dont il voudrait être l'éraste, pour en faire son éromène, pour la raison plutôt paradoxale que n'étant pas amoureux de lui, il se conduira mieux que s'il l'était, et que la chose tournera à leur avantage réciproque s'il se montre complaisant. Socrate reçoit ce discours assez froidement, et ne partage pas les transports de Phèdre. Mais pressé par ce dernier il accepte de traiter le sujet à son tour. Par contre, il se borne à traiter des écarts de conduite de celui sous l'emprise d'un amour débridé, et se garde bien de faire l'éloge de celui qui n'aime point.



Alors qu'il s'apprête à quitter le lieu, Socrate feint ou non de ressentir l'appel de son "démon", qui lui indique qu'il a commis une faute envers la divinité par son discours impie, et qu'il ne pourra expier que par une palinodie. D'abord, Phèdre n'aurait-il pas honte de tenir un discours pareil à deux amoureux honnêtes ? Ne le jugeraient il pas très défavorablement ? Socrate reprend donc son discours, non plus d'un point de vue purement logique, mais en faisant appel à un mythe pour faire sentir de manière plus complète la nature de l'amour comme l'un des états de l'âme où elle est, hors de son état normal, sous l'emprise d'une passion érotique - comme l'inspiration mantique ou poétique - qui peut être décomposée en plusieurs parties: D'une part un désir qui prend sa source dans une douleur, un manque, et qui est donc considéré comme aliénant et avilissant. D'autre part, un désir plus pur qui ne provient d'aucun manque, mais simplement du plaisir de contempler la beauté et la bonté (deux notions presque indissociables pour les grecs). Ces deux désirs de nature différente sont représentés dans le mythes par des chevaux dont un cocher essaie tant bien que mal de discipliner l'élan et la fougue. Mais d'où vient que l'âme puisse "inconsciemment" reconnaître la beauté et la bonté, alors que "consciemment", la chose semble bien difficile?

Socrate lève cette difficulté en supposant la métempsychose, l'âme ayant été antérieurement à la naissance amenée à suivre au delà des cieux le cortège circulaire des étoiles, suivant l'un des douze dieux (l'une des constellation), s'étant imprégné du dieu correspondant (cf l'astrologie), et ayant contemplé la perfection incarnée par Zeus, qui préside au centre de l'univers ( univers = une chose qui tourne en latin). Ce dernier discours enthousiasme Lysias, qui revient complètement du plaisir que lui avait causé celui de Lysias. Il a l'avantage de ne pas infirmer la part de vérité du discours précédent, mais en le complétant, de le corriger des fausses conséquences qu'il insinuait. Sur la forme, il est certes très joli, mais quel crédit un lecteur moderne peut-il lui accorder, surtout avec toutes ces fables extravagantes ? Et surtout, qu'en pensent réellement Socrate et Platon ?

A mon avis, la réponse à cette question se trouve dans un échange préalable ayant lieu entre Socrate et Phèdre, alors qu'ils cherchent encore un endroit pour s'installer confortablement dans la nature. Comme ils sont près d'un ruisseau qui coule près de la ville, ils en viennent à évoquer une légende relative à l'enlèvement de la nymphe Orithe par Borée. Or Phèdre, en faisant allusion aux interprétations physique du mythe, demande à Socrate s'il y croit, ce à quoi il répond de manière nette que son problème n'est pas tant de démêler la vérité sur une question douteuse de cette nature, mais bien plutôt de viser à sa propre édification morale:

n  
n  σκοπῶ οὐ ταῦτα ἀλλ΄ἐμαυτόν
Ce ne sont pas ces fables que j'examine, c'est moi-même.
n

Pour les explications, il lui suffit donc de prendre celle qui est communément acceptée. Si le mythe est ce qui plaira le plus au grand nombre, alors c'est une forme adéquate, mais il ne méprise pas pour autant les interprétations plus rationnelles. C'est une manière de subordonner et la physique et la métaphysique, à la question morale et éthique. A mon avis, ce choix avisé vient d'une volonté de ne pas diviser sur une question aussi difficile et clivante que la nature de l'âme, et donc de prendre une forme neutre - celle du mythe - qui puisse être acceptée par tous, lorsqu'il s'agit de traiter d'une question morale. Les fables d’Ésope ne sont elles pas elles aussi, des vecteurs d'édification estimés ? Une autre raison qui me pousse à cette interprétation, c'est le discours de Socrate rapporté par Xénophon au jeune sceptique, auquel il explique qu'il est honteux de faire appel aux dieux pour les questions que la logique peut résoudre, mais non pas pour ceux où elle est inopérante (il s'agissait de mantique).

Mais comment donner son assentiment à la signification morale de tel ou tel mythe ? Car c'est là, finalement, la question. Il n'y a, à mon avis, pas d'autre moyen que de rentrer dans soi-même, et puiser dans sa propre expérience la manière dont le mythe s'accorde ou non avec la vie intérieure. C'est-ce qu'il me semble, dans ce sens qu'il faut interpréter la suite du récit, en particulier le mythe égyptien de Teuth.


Le dieu Toth

Le revirement causé par ce discours est en effet l'occasion de rebondir sur le cas plus général de la manière d'employer les discours, que ce soit pour enseigner la vérité, ou pour persuader. De la même manière que pour l'amour, toute question peut être traitée de manière complète ou partielle ( et donc partiale). Socrate nous donne un critère pour identifier les discours philosophiques, cherchant la vérité plutôt que la simple persuasion, qui n'est finalement pas très loin de la méthode de Descartes(*): il s'agit, lorsqu'on traite une question de poser des définitions, de procéder par une analyse à une décomposition en éléments plus simple, et enfin de vérifier par une synthèse qu'on a bien épuisé la question dans son ensemble. A la fin, chaque élément doit être à sa place, en harmonie (qui en grec, signifie ajustement). Et surtout, le plus important, chacun des point doit être divisé jusqu'au point de nous paraître évidemment vraie, comme si nous la savions déjà. Pour les discours visant à convaincre, l'important n'est donc pas tant de lister toutes les ficelles dont l'usage a montré l'efficacité que de savoir devant qui, dans quelles circonstances et dans quel but il faut les employer: omettre ces points, ce n'est pas traiter la question à fond.

Finalement, le texte finit par la prière que Socrate fait à Phèdre de prévenir Lysias qu'il ne mérite pas le nom de sage, tandis qu'il fait un éloge d'Isocrates. Le choix de ces deux personnages n'a pour moi rien d'anodin, et comporte une signification politique. Lysias était un avocat, versé à fond dans la rhétorique, et les quelques textes qui nous sont parvenus nous font voir l'habileté de ses plaidoiries, ainsi que son engagement à défendre les démocrates suite aux abus de la tyrannie des trente, malgré les promesses de paix. Au contraire, Isocrate avait des sentiments aristocratiques, et a plutôt écrit des exhortations morales, des lettres édifiantes à des princes et des tyrans, et a toute sa vie travaillé au "grand dessein": la fin des luttes intestines qui divisaient la Grèce, et l'unité contre les barbares. Platon laisse ici éclater de manière transparente ses opinions politiques, en fustigeant une démocratie abimée par la démagogie, et en louant les dirigeants ayant avant tout le souci de l'éthique et de la morale. Un regret quand même, c'est que les anciens n'aient pas pu ou voulu envisager la question de l'éducation.

L'interprétation du texte est difficile, comme en témoigne la masse des écrits sur le sujet, parfois divergeant, et dont la fin de l'ouvrage brosse un synoptique. Je n'ai aucune prétention sur le fait que la mienne l'emporte particulièrement sur les autres. Elle est en grande partie influencée par la lecture de Plutarque. Il existe des écrits antiques spécifiquement dédiés à l'étude du Phèdre, comme les notes par Hermias d'Alexandrie lors des cours de Syrianus. Cet ouvrage est malheureusement introuvable en français. Il y a aussi les Ennéades de Plotin, mais depuis qu'on m'a dit qu'il était plus froid qu'Aristote, j'hésite à entamer leur lecture.

(*) La Méthode de Descartes en quatre points:
- ne recevoir jamais aucune chose pour vraie que je ne la connusse évidemment être telle : c'est-à-dire d'éviter soigneusement la précipitation et la prévention ; et de ne comprendre rien de plus en mes jugements, que ce qui se présenterait si clairement et si distinctement que je n'eusse aucune occasion de la mettre en doute.
-diviser chacune des difficultés que j'examinerai en autant de parcelles qu'il se pourra et qu'il sera requis pour mieux les résoudre.
-conduire par ordre mes pensées en commençant par les objets les plus simples et les plus aisés à connaître, pour monter peu à peu comme par degrés jusqu'à la connaissance des plus composés. Et supposant même de l'ordre entre ceux qui ne se précèdent point naturellement les uns des autres.
-faire partout des dénombrements si entiers, et des revues si générales que je fusse assuré de ne rien omettre.

On dirait furieusement celle de Socrate dans le Phèdre...!

n  I am myself a great lover of these processes of division and generalization; they help me to speak and to think.n

This is one of Plato’s more discursive dialogues, wandering from topic to topic like a real conversation rather than presenting a tight argument. As such, it is not exactly satisfying as a presentation of Plato’s idealistic philosophy by itself; but it makes for a wonderful companion piece to other dialogues, such as the Gorgias or the Symposium.

The two primary themes of this dialogue are love and rhetoric; and they are combined in the criticism of speeches about love. The love that Plato embraces is, predictably, Platonic: the admiration of the soul rather than the lust of the body. As usual, Socrates attacks rhetoric for being the art of twisting and obscuring the truth; and as usual, I find his arguments to be rather purposefully naïve. Knowing the truth and convincing somebody else of it are two entirely different things; and the skillful use of language can very much help with the latter (though, of course, it can also be used to deceive). Plato of all writers knew the value of rhetoric: it is as much for his literary skill as his intellectual merit that he remains so widely read.

As a case in point, this dialogue is notable for containing some of Plato’s more memorable episodes. We see Socrates, for once, outside the city, relishing the beauty of the natural scenery, his senses almost drunk with pleasure. The “madness” or “divine inspiration” of lovers and poets is frequently noted, to be contrasted with the cool rationality of Socrates. Plato also gives us the famous metaphor of the soul as a charioteer with two horses, one of the flesh and one of the spirit. And the dialogue ends with Socrates’ denunciation of writing—which, again, can only sound playfully disingenuous when written by Plato. The dialogue then ends, and Socrates and rhetoric live to fight another day.

[Abridged in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A]

I've also read this a few years ago in full, here we skip the long set-up and love discussions and focus just on Socrates's thoughts on rhetoric and writing. He seems to be against writing because it allows you to know without remembering. Writing is silent and doesn't answer questions or defend itself - easily misused.

"The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it happy as any human being can be."


>first speech of socrates
We are all ruled, he says, by two principles: one is our inborn desire for pleasure, and the other is our acquired judgment that pursues what is best (237d). Following your judgment is "being in your right mind", while following desire towards pleasure without reason is "outrage"

>Second speech
-madness given as a gift of the gods provides us with some of the best things we have.
-A soul is like the "natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer".
-What is outside of heaven, says Socrates, is quite difficult to describe, lacking color, shape, or solidity, as it is the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence.
-One comes to manifest this sort of love after seeing beauty here on earth and being reminded of true beauty as it was seen beyond heaven
-A lover's friendship is divine, Socrates concludes, while that of a non-lover offers only cheap, human dividends, and tosses the soul about on earth for 9,000 years.

> Discussion of rhetoric and writing
-persuasion being the purpose of speechmaking and oration. Socrates first objects that an orator who does not know bad from good will, in Phaedrus's words, harvest "a crop of really poor quality"
-one must make systematic divisions between two different kinds of things: one sort, like "iron" and "silver", suggests the same to all listeners; the other sort, such as "good" or "justice", lead people in different directions.
-He goes on to compare one with only knowledge of these tools to a doctor who knows how to raise and lower a body's temperature but does not know when it is good or bad to do so,
-Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.
-No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain. Writings are silent; they cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense.

n  

n    “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

~ Platon  

n

n  THE SCHOOL OF LOVEn

Phaedrus is commonly paired on the one hand with Gorgias and on the other with Symposium - with all three combining and leading towards Republic. It is compared with Gorgias in sharing its principal theme, the nature and limitations of rhetoric, and with Symposium in being devoted to the nature and value of erotic love. The connection with Republic is more tenuous, though it contributes to the criticism of the arts of Rhetoric. Also, the psychology illustrated here by the image of the charioteer and the two horses is fully compatible with the tripartite psychology of Republic and even clarifies an important ambiguity in it.

The Setting

Socrates and Phaedrus walks out from Athens along the river Ilisus. The conversation that takes place between Phaedrus and Socrates is both interrupted and motivated by three speeches - one by Lysias, and then two extemporized by Socrates himself in response, inspired to employ his knowledge of philosophy in crafting two speeches on the subject of erotic love, to show how paltry is the best effort on the same subject of the best orator in Athens, Lysias, who knows no philosophy.

n  The Three Speechesn

The First Speech:

The first speech (purportedly by Lysias), is a shallow, badly constructed piece–a ‘clever’ piece of sophistry designed to establish the implausible thesis that the pursued (loved) should gratify someone who is not feeling love ("non-lover") rather than a true erastēs (lover).

The Second Speech:

Not surprisingly, since in this speech Socrates undertakes to improve on the form at least as much as the content of Lysias’ speech, there is considerable overlap of theme. Ethically, however, Socrates appears to have more genuine concern for the good of the ‘loved’ than Lysias did.

But most interestingly, Socrates takes the dichotomy of Lysias’ speech - of Non-Lover Vs Lover - and inverts the whole argument by subsuming both categories into Lust. It is left unsaid till the Third Speech, but Socrates has now effectively made the argument into Lust Vs Love (Non-Lover also included into Lust). Ever heard of the expression “Platonic Love”? It is far more interesting than its popular meaning!


n  

“These are the points you should bear in mind, my boy. You should know that the friendship of a lover arises without any good will at all. No, like food, its purpose is to sate hunger. ‘Do wolves love lambs? That’s how lovers befriend the loved!’”

n
n  The Third Speech (The Palinode):n

Lysias’ speech had argued that a lover is to be avoided in favor of a non-lover, and in Socrates’ first speech he seeks merely to improve upon this thesis of Lysias, but in the second he entirely repudiates the content of the first, and he calls this second speech a recantation, or palinode.

The straight-forward opposition of pleasure and the good in the Second Speech, though reminiscent of early dialogues such as Gorgias, is thus undermined in the palinode, where we see that the impulse towards pleasure is an essential part of a person’s motivation, and that if his/her rational part is in control, this impulse can be channelled towards the good.

The Palinode thus gives a less one-sided view of love - a view in which love and reason can go hand in hand, in which love is not entirely selfish but can be associated with educational and moral values, and in which, at the same time, passion and desire find their proper place. In order fully to praise love, Plato felt that he had to explain its place in the metaphysical life of a human being - through a myth, as usual.

The overall movement of the central part of the palinode is that it begins with a vision of the soul’s purpose and ends with an analysis of the human condition of love.

The suggestion is that we won’t understand human experience unless it is put into a much larger context, and that the experience of love is essential for a human being to fulfill his/her highest potential.

After these three speeches, the conversation turns to the value of rhetoric in general, and what could be done to make it a true branch of expertise or knowledge.

On Rhetoric: An Aside

A dialogue earlier than Phaedrus, Gorgias, is devoted to rhetoric and to the contrast between the rival ways of life philosophy and rhetoric promote. In Phaedrus, the question of the value of rhetoric is raised immediately after the palinode, and signals an abrupt change of direction for the dialogue: as to what constitutes good and bad rhetoric, and Socrates suggests that knowledge of truth is the criterion: persuasion without knowledge is denigrated: without a grasp of truth, rhetoric will remain ‘an unsystematic knack’.

Now, this too is a reference to Gorgias, where rhetoric was defined in just these terms. Plato does not really seem have changed his mind about it since Gorgias.

There are two main overt topics in the dialogue––rhetoric and love. Rhetoric is meant to persuade, and a lover will try to persuade his/her beloved to gratify their desires (the Greek word for ‘persuade’ also means ‘seduce’). The lover’s search for the right kind of beloved to persuade is a specific case of the general principle that the true rhetorician must choose a suitable kind of soul with the help of dialectical insight. The lovers are said to try to persuade their beloveds to follow a divine pattern - this is the highest educational aspect of love.

Thus the dialogue is about love and rhetoric, as it seems to be, but they are connected because both are forms of "soul-leading" - both are educational.

So for this reviewer, the question of which to focus on - of Rhetoric n  orn Love - is redundant. A focus on either should serve the purpose, and the focus for the rest of this review will be on Love. Rhetoric got its space n  in the Gorgias review.n

n  Love: The Guiding Light of Philosophersn

The first two speeches raise the question whether or not love is a good thing, and the rest of the dialogue answers the question in the affirmative. Love is good because it enables one to draw near to another person whose soul is of the same type as one’s own, but is capable of becoming more perfectly so. This educational potential will be fulfilled provided the pair channel their energies into mutual education; this is the proper context of the praise lavished on the combination of philosophy and love.

Platonic Love: A Clarification

Before we go further, we need to address the standard criticism on “Platonic Love”: that it is about non-sexual love. More importantly, the even more educated criticism has to be addressed: that it is about Homoerotic love.

For this, we need to take a look at the Athenian society of the time:

First, the Athenians rarely married for love: a wife was for bearing children, while slave-girls were used for extra sex. Love, then, was more likely to be met outside marriage––and it might be a younger man who aroused it. And this goes not just for love, but even for the shared interests that underpin love: the educational potential of a love-affair, always one of the main things that interested Plato, was unlikely to be fulfilled in one’s marriage, since an Athenian male had few shared interests with his wife and would not expect her to be interested in education. Second, with women being seen more or less entirely as sex-objects, Plato clearly felt that it was all too easy to get caught by the physical side of a heterosexual relationship. However, since Athenian society did place a slight stigma on the sexual side of a homoerotic relationship, a lover might well hesitate before consummating the relationship in this way––and such hesitation, vividly portrayed in Phaedrus, meant that there was at least the opportunity for the sexual energy to be channelled towards higher, spiritual or educational purposes.

Moreover, the older man was expected to cultivate the boy’s mind – to be an intellectual companion. It was, in effect, a form of education. Greek education was pitiful: restricted to upper-class boys, and taught no more than the three Rs, sport, Homer and the lyric poets, and the ability to play a musical instrument. In a peculiar way, the Athenian institution of homoerotic affairs filled a gap by providing a boy with a more realistic grasp of local culture and worldly wisdom.

Thus, we can see why homoeroticism is the context - only because it was normal then and not because it was regarded as worthy of special attention against a standard of heterosexuality as ‘normal’.

Transposed on to present society, we can see that the whole enterprise should logically apply now to ‘normal’ or heterosexual relations as well - and is quite in character for the modern times - some would even say that it is the ideal!

Thus, glossing over homoeroticism as a relic of the Athenian society, we need to read instead from our own society’s standpoint. Hence, in this review you will find that the ‘love’ spoken of is directed not at a ‘boy’ as in the Platonic dialogue/society but at the ‘loved’ (as substituted by the reviewer), without discrimination. This is also the most useful (and logical) POV for this reviewer to adopt to understand the dialogue best. Also, please assume the he/she or his/her connotation if the reviewer has omitted it at places.

n  The Myth: Love as The Window to the Universen

It is often said that Symposium, Republic and Phaedrus should be read together. This is particularly true when it comes to the interconnected Myths that populate these three dialogues.

Poetic and inspiring myths portray the soul’s vision of reality and love in The Symposium as well as in Phaedrus:

In his myth in The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes present the famous story about soul mates:



The myth in Phaedrus, altering this, is a description of the entire cycle of what can happen to a soul: we hear of the tripartite nature of souls and how it is essential to a winged soul to rise up attempt to see the plain of truth which lies beyond. In the Myth, we are incarnated as humans if the attempt was not fully successful, doomed for thousands of years.

A philosophically-inclined-lover, however, can use his/her memory of Forms, to regrow their wings and ascend again. This Memory is triggered by the glimpse of Beauty in his/her beloved - if his love of truth is enough to leave him with a lingering dissatisfaction with every day life. Beauty alone has this privilege, to be the most clearly visible and the most loved - and thus the trigger for the Quest for meaning.

Love & Memory: Mutual Assistants

Readers and admirers of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would find this section particularly identifiable. Love as remembrance should also find ready acceptance among Proust readers. In fact, the image of the loved triggering a vision of beauty that unlocks the memory of life’s true purpose is just about as Proustian as it gets. ‘Loved’ then need not be a person at all - it just needs to be a store of memory, personally beautiful enough to trigger the vision of the ‘beyond’ of everyday life, but this is a digression.

In the palinode, love and memory are critically connected: love is our reaction to the half-remembered Form of Beauty (and of Truth). The starting-point is the perception of beauty on earth, and the consequent recollection of Beauty seen before. The beloved’s face acts, as it were, as a window on to the Form.

In short, love prompts recollection, recollection is the precondition for knowledge, and knowledge is the precondition for the right handling of words. In this way, all the major themes of the dialogue tie together.

n  The Chariot of Life: The Rider & The Horsesn

The Soul is divided in three at the beginning of the Myth - two parts in the form of horses and the third in that of a charioteer. One of the horses is good, the other not; one white, noble and the aide of Reason, the other unruly, Black and crazed with desire. The difference between the two is that the bad horse’s reasoning is limited to short-term goals (just as Lysias’ non-lover was too), whereas the charioteer aims for and considers the overall goodness of a person’s life as a whole.



This is, in fact, very reminiscent of n  The Bhagavad Gitan with the Senses as the Horses and Reason as the Charioteer.



n  n    Philosophy, Love & Lust - An Inventory of Usefulnessn  n

Plato chose the term erōs from the range of possibilities because of its frankly passionate connotations. In Phaedrus he gives an astonishing analysis of what, in his view, is really happening beneath the surface of a love-affair, and focuses particularly on its ecstatic aspects - the ability of love to get us to transcend our normal bounds. Notice, then, how far removed this conception of love is from what we generally understand by the phrase ‘platonic love’, which is defined by my dictionary as ‘love between soul and soul, without sensual desire’. On the contrary, ‘sensual desire’ has to be present, because it is the energizing force.

The Two Horses symbolize Love and Lust, in a fashion:



The Black Horse/Lust/Sensual Desire is crucial to the process: It is the one that gets us close enough to the beloved/soulmate in the first place!



Thus, the non-intellectual elements of the soul were necessary sources of motivational energy and that the passions, and the actions inspired by them, are intrinsically valuable components of the best human life. The intensity of the experience of philosophical love, as Plato sees it, is precisely the intensity of the simultaneous presence in the lover of passion.



To return to the course of the myth, we are told in the second part about the development of a human love-affair. The nature of the love-affair depends entirely, we hear, on how removed the philosopher-partner is from the world (how ascetic he is, in a sense): if he is fully mired in his body, all he will want is sex with the beautiful beloved who arouses his love, but if he is a philosopher the vision of worldly beauty will remind him of heavenly Beauty, and his soul will grow wings and aspire to return to the region beyond heaven where he first caught sight of true Beauty. But Plato stresses that the philosophic lover will not want this just for himself: being attracted to someone like himself––that is, to a potential philosopher––he wants to bring out this potential in his partner. Thus, not only does the philosophical lover educate his partner, but he also educates himself: he ascends the ladder only by pulling someone else up on to the rung he has vacated. The educational aspect of philosophy is here properly fulfilled.

The implication is that the kind of lover you are on earth depends, to a large extent, on how philosophic you are, how receptive you are to the vision of Beauty. It depends entirely on you if Love opens the window to Philosophy.


n  The Academy of Life: Loven

Erōs is the Greek word for ‘passionate love’, and in the context of relations between human beings it means primarily ‘sexual desire’, or even ‘lust’. Because erōs in this sense invariably has a sharply delineated object - it is not just a vacuous feeling of warmth or affection - it suits Plato’s purposes, since his major enquiry is to ask what the true object of love is.

Is it no more than it appears to be, or is it something deeper? In Symposium he answers that love is a universal force that energizes and motivates us in whatever we do, because its object is something we perceive as good for ourselves. Its object, self-evidently (at least, for Plato and his fellow Greeks), is beauty.

The ultimate, deepest aim of Love, Plato says, is immortality - self-procreation in a beautiful environment. The highest manifestation of this is not the physical procreation of offspring, but the perpetuation of ideas in an educational environment in which the lover takes on the education of the beloved. This is the position taken for granted in Phaedrus.



There is also a more prosaic and non-mythical way to approach the message in Phaedrus: As Plato makes plain elsewhere, when he says that someone desires something, he means that he lacks something. So when he says that love is lack, we also need to see what it is that a lover’s soul lacks, and it turns out to be the perfection of itself as a human soul - knowledge or self-knowledge. Someone in love has an inkling of his own imperfection, and is impelled to try to remedy the defect.

Though couched in terms of his own metaphysics and psychology, Plato’s description of passionate love will strike an immediate chord with any lover. Love can make philosophers of any of us. Love is important because beauty* is the most accessible Form here on earth and is the primary object of love.

* Note that it is always a very personal conception of ‘Beauty’ being referred to - which only the beloved can see - the whole ‘eye of the beholder thing’, if you please. Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion from among those who are beautiful to them, and then treats the loved like his/her very own god, building him/her up and adorning him/her as an image to honor and worship.

Hence, Love is the best school possible - a place of mutual, continuous, most interested, interesting and truly involved education that one can ever find. There is nowhere else that you can learn more about the human condition. Enroll in the school of love if you would be philosophers, if you would know the meaning of life. Know Thyself, through Love.
n  

“You may believe this or not as you like. But, seriously, the cause of love is as I have said, and this is how lovers really feel.”

n

Plato at his most playful. First Socrates presents one argument about romantic love (in a nutshell--that it's dangerous and not to be messed with), then professes to have changed his mind and presents an extreme counter to his own argument, (that love is a reminder of our true spiritual form and should be sought above all else). He finally reveals that he's just been messing with Phaedrus in order to show him how unwieldy and unreliable the art of rhetoric can be.

Am rămas uimit câtă elocință cuprind dialogurile acestui volum. Sînt la prima lectură a unui volum atribuit lui Platon și mă așteptam să-mi fie mult mai greu să-l asimilez, dar surpriza a fost de proporții. Simplitatea nu are nevoie de cuvinte pompoase, iar frumusețea ei e nemărginită. Nu îndrăznesc să-i dau rating lui Platon, cum nu am făcut-o nici cu alți „grei” și înțelepți, ci rămân cu încântarea lăuntrică de după parcurgerea volumului, pe care l-am savurat extrem de lent. Abia aștept să-l citesc pe următorul.

Very interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed it.